Milan, 20 May (IANS/AKI) Italian police have arrested a Moroccan man suspected of taking part in the March attack on the Bardo National Museum in Tunisia’s capital Tunis which killed 22 people, most of them tourists.
Italy’s Digos counter-terrorism police arrested 22-year-old Touil Abdelmajid overnight in an apartment in the town of Gaggiano in northern Italy, where he was living with his mother and two brothers.
The anti-terror police also seized unspecified materials from the apartment.
It was not immediately clear what Abdelmajid’s alleged involvement in the Bardo attack was.
“Thanks very much to security forces who arrested an individual sought over the Tunis attack. I am proud of you!” Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said on Twitter.
Moroccan authorities had issued an international arrest warrant for Abdelmajid, who was identified by Italian authorities when he arrived in Sicily on February 17 aboard a migrant boat from North Africa with 90 other passengers.
Abdelmajid, who is an illegal immigrant in Italy, was served with an expulsion order by Sicilian police and returned to North Africa for the March 18 gun attack on the Bardo museum in Tunis, according to investigators.
The Islamic State Sunni extremist group previously said it was behind the assault, which left 21 tourists, including four Italians, a Tunisian policeman and two Tunisian gunmen dead.
The two Tunisian assailants who had opened fire on tourists as they got off buses outside the museum were gunned down at the scene after taking hostages inside the museum.
A third gunman was on the run and several people had been arrested, Tunisia’s President Beji Caid Essebsi said a few days after the attack.
At the end of March, Tunisia claimed to have killed the alleged leader of the assault, Algernian militant Lokman Abu Sakhra.
–IANS/AKI
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