(AFP) Italy’s anti-terrorism police and Europol on Tuesday arrested Pakistanis suspected of links to the man who attacked France’s Charlie Hebdo magazine in 2020.
The sting led to “arrests in Italy and abroad of Pakistani citizens with direct ties” to Zaheer Hassan Mahmood, a Pakistani man who attacked two people with a meat cleaver weeks after the magazine republished controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, Italian police said.
It did not say how many were arrested.
Europol’s European Counter Terrorism Centre coordinated the operation along with anti-terrorism police in France and Spain, according to police in Genoa in north-west Italy, where a judge signed 14 arrest warrants concerning offences related to “international terrorism.”
