Rome--Italy's interior minister said Thursday that the arrest of a Moroccan illegal immigrant wanted for the Tunis museum attack had been a police success, rebuffing claims it had exposed gaping holes in the country's security net.
"I will leave (upcoming) electoral campaign arguments out of my statement: we are talking about the arrest of a terrorism suspect, about a successful investigation that was the result of good cooperation between several countries in the fight against terrorism," Angelino Alfano told parliament a day after Abdel Majid Touil, 22, was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the March attack in which 21 tourists died.
The case has triggered a furious reaction from opposition politicians after it emerged that Touil had arrived in Italy in February aboard a boat carrying hundreds of migrants.
He was photographed, finger-printed and given an order to leave the country within 15 days.
Authorities then lost track of him for the best part of three months until his arrest this week, which only happened because his mother, a legal resident of Italy, reported his passport missing.
Opponents of the centre-left government have seized on the case as evidence that jihadists can easily get into Italy by posing as migrants and that lax controls on arriving asylum-seekers mean they have no trouble staying.
Indirectly responding to demands for borders to be closed and for the expulsion of illegal immigrants to be accelerated, Alfano said the government had put in place proportionate and appropriate measures in relation to the arrival at southern ports of thousands of migrants every week.
AFP
