Al Qaeda in Milan

Headlines in Italy this week read: "We wanted to strike Milan," a quote from a so-called pentito (repentant) member of al Qaeda who had been arrested in Milan and was now telling all he knew - and maybe quite a bit more - to the police and the press.

We've known for some time that Milan was al Qaeda's European headquarters, and had comforted ourselves with the thought that they surely wouldn't want to do anything nasty in their own backyard. Perhaps we were wrong. This pentito claimed that al Qaeda had planned several bombings in Milan, including the Carabinieri HQ in via Moscova (where a former schoolmate of Rossella's lives with her family) and the Central Station.

The odd thing was, the plan was to hit the station on Christmas or New Year's day - the two least-travelled days in Italy, when everyone is home with their families or sleeping off a party. So either these guys had failed to understand something fundamental about Italian culture, or something is fishy with the whole story. Boh.

Fiat of Terror

Apr 27, 2004

I recently mentioned that Enrico has been stopped on the road in Italy three times in two months, as part of apparently random police checks. We got pulled over again just before Easter, in Austria, by two guys in an unmarked car. They pulled us off the highway, showed badges, and asked for ID. Fortunately, I had thought to bring my passport and Rossella's, since she is not yet old enough for the ID card that every adult in Italy carries. The police looked at our papers and Enrico's, and waved us on. No mention of why they pulled us over, and of course we didn't ask. So now I'm wondering - is it our car? A vast number were sold of this model of Fiat, so a tip that terrorists might own one could lead to a lot of pullovers. Ours by now is old and somewhat beat up, which probably adds to the suspicion. Thankfully, Enrico hasn't worn a beard in decades - he looked very middle-eastern in his full-beard days (I've seen pictures), and was once addressed in Arabic by a fellow stander in a US embassy line.