Roundup: Italy escalates alert after Brussels terror attacks

Italy has deported nine possible terror extremists since the start of the year and raised its security level to the second degree, the highest possible in the absence of a direct attack following the Brussels tragedy.

All the measures taken in Italy indicated that the country had escalated alert on possible assault after the Paris terror shootings last November.

According to Interior Minister Angelino Alfano, a total of 75 were expelled from Italy in 2015.

He said a Moroccan man, the former president of an Islamic center in Chieti, a central Italian city, was deported on Thursday because the man was "known for his fundamentalist stance" and expressed a desire "to go and fight in Syria" on several occasions.

An Iraqi man, identified by France and Belgium as having links to terrorist groups, was arrested near Naples on Tuesday, just hours after attacks in Brussels which killed 31 people and injured some 300.

In the hours following the three blasts of March 22 in the Belgian capital, European countries reinforced their own security measures with checks and inspections at national borders and airports.

Italy incremented such screenings in its whole territory, extending the guard to all the main sensitive points mapped across the country.

Right after the Brussels blasts, Italy held an emergency meeting of the national public order and security committee.

Alfano said at a press conference that besides the strict coordination between the police forces and the Italian intelligence services, the priority for intervention would be given to three directions: upgrading of controls and scans at airports and maritime ports; boosting of the surveillance on the Internet about the level of probable consensus expressed on the web (among targeted extremist environments), raised by the recent attacks; intensification of the expulsions of radicalized persons, whose actions in Italy had been in any case monitored.

In Tuesday afternoon, Rome airports of Fiumicino and Ciampino, Milan Linate and Malpensa, the main railway stations as well as the other basic infrastructures were protected by an increased presence of police personnel.

The greatest worry of the Italian authorities consists in the safeguard of the Easter rites, which, in 2016, coincide with the Jubilee Year.

In fact, Rome represents an easy target for terrorists. According to the local media, the government's plan focuses on the overlook of monuments, crowded places like the Colosseum, the embassies and the subways.

Upon a specific alert of the anti-terrorism unit, a large police operation is expected to be carried out in the capital against an extremist cell, composed of some 10 people who would huddle in a flat in the city outskirts, the local media reported.

Italy has kept on severe border security checks, implemented since Paris' killing of last November in the frame of Schengen Treaty, which allows derogations, within temporal limits, to the free passage of people between the member states.

Since the beginning of 2015 the Italian police conducted 2,249 physical searches of persons linked with extremist movements and arrested 396. The government has decided to maintain the alert level at the current degree.

The "zero risk" does not exist, but what happened in Belgium is unfortunately the dreadful proof of that: "we can just tighten the machine bolts and let run the prevention at its best", Alfano believes. Endit