A foreign fighter accused of torture arrested in Brescia

A foreign fighter accused of torture arrested in Brescia.

The State Police of Brescia has a 28-year-old Italian foreign fighter of Moroccan origins arrested, for kidnapping and personal injury, aggravated by having used torture and acted with cruelty and for the purpose of terrorism and racial hatred.

In June 2019, the man, currently detained, was picked up in Kobane (Syria) where he was under arrest. After a radical ideological adhesion to Islamic Jihad begun in Italy and completed in Germany, the 28-year-old had left for Syria where he became an operative of the self-styled Islamic State.

In July 2020, the Court of Brescia sentenced him to 4 years in prison, a sentence later confirmed on appeal.

The subsequent in-depth investigations into the matter, also conducted in the context of international collaboration, found a turning point in the exchange of information between the Italian and German authorities which revealed how the same foreign fighter could also have been responsible for torture and abuse against of at least two people, including a teenager, who had refused to fight for ISIS and are currently refugees in Germany.

The testimony collected in Dusseldorf by one of the torture victims was decisive in this sense: in showing the scars of the torture suffered, the witness also told of torture perpetrated with electric shocks against Kurdish "detainees" belonging to the Yazidi minority to force them to convert to Islam.