Investigators cold on terrorism links on Malta-bound Syrians

An unsuspecting transit stop through Malta International Airport has been cited as a “new route” for illegal migration, according to Italian newspaper La Stampa.

Malta, Genoa, and Bergamo’s Orio al Serio featured recently in arrests of Syrian travellers passing through passport control with false documents, and in some cases, carrying mobile phone photographs of Islamic State fighters.

But detectives who spoke to La Stampa claim their ultimate destination is London.

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What the recent episodes show so far, according to counter-terrorism police sources who spoke to the newspaper, was that without evidence to the contrary, “everything suggests that we are looking at migrant trafficking episodes, two of which are certainly linked. But we are prepared to reconsider the episodes if further evidence emerges.”

Three recent episodes of the airport arrests seem to attest to the idea that Italy was being used as a transit area, and the decision to use “provincial” airports was to test police responsiveness to illegal movements.

The bizarre route undertaken by the Syrians was to enter the Schengen zone from Turkey through Greece, the Balkans, Italy, in order to reach Malta and then maybe – according to investigators’ hypotheses – to fly from there to the United Kingdom.

“Initial evidence suggests that the episodes in Orio al Serio and in Ciampino are linked. They are linked first and foremost by sharing the same final destination for the two couples travelling, namely Malta.

“The two couples detained in Orio al Serio and in Ciampino were attempting to reach Malta, which hosts a large Syrian community. The Mediterranean island, however, is unlikely to have been their final destination; their journey should likely have continued from there to a country in north Europe,” La Stampa reported.

The two Syrian couples reached Italy overland, via the Balkan route. One of the two people detained at Orio al Serio on 18 November and subsequently investigated on a charge of association and recruitment for the purpose of international terrorism, had a photograph in his smartphone showing him wearing an ISIS uniform.

He justified the photograph by saying that he had been forced to play the cop and to direct traffic at a crossroads in Raqqa, the Syrian city currently serving as the capital base for Islamic State. The two people detained in Ciampino the day before, on 17 November, also had forged ID, one of them purporting to be Norwegian, the other French.