A Moroccan man who recently arrived in Italy on a boat with migrants has been arrested on suspicion of helping to plan a March terror attack that killed more than 20 people in Tunisia’s Bardo Museum, Italian police said Wednesday.
Tuil Abdelmajid, also known as Abdal, was arrested Tuesday evening in the Italian village of Gaggiano, near Milan, said Bruno Megale, head of Italy’s special operations police agency.
Megale didn’t say what precisely connected Abdelmajid to the March 18 attack in Tunisia’s capital, except to say that he was wanted on an international arrest warrant requested by Tunisian authorities.
ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, in which assailants entered the museum and gunned down visitors, many of them foreign tourists. Four Italians were among those killed.
Tunisian security forces said they killed two gunmen that day, and that a third attacker was on the run. Later that month, Tunisia’s Prime Minister announced that Algerian national Khaled Shayeb, the alleged architect of the assault, was one of nine suspected militants killed in a raid in the south of the country.
Abdelmajid, 22, arrived on the Italian island of Sicily on a boat with 90 migrants in February, weeks before the Tunis attack, Megale told reporters Wednesday.
Gaggiano, the village in which he was arrested Tuesday, is where his mother and two brothers live, Megale said.
Abdelmajid was wanted on an international warrant accusing him of premeditated murder, conspiracy against state security, kidnapping and being a member of a terrorist organization, Megale said.
