Italy has expelled 35 suspected Islamic State jihadists in the last year, the country’s interior ministry said yesterday, amid claims that 50 had arrived on boats from Tunisia.
The Tunisians arrived in small fast boats to unmonitored Sicilian beaches, where they are dropped off by traffickers and vanish, heading for train stations and destinations in Italy and Europe.
Suspicions that Islamic State recruits were among the economic migrants making the trip have increased after defeats of Isis in Syria and Iraq and the return home of some of the more than 5,000 Tunisian foreign fighters.
Authorities identified more than 6,000 Tunisians making the journey by boat to Italy in 2017, with a surge in sailings in September when about 1,400 arrived. A further 1,000 are believed to have made the trip that month and disappeared after landing. Some 365 have been identified after making the trip in January.
Today Interpol was understood to have circulated a list of 50 names of suspected Islamic State fighters who made the trip last year, including one thought to have made it to France.
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Responding to the report, the Italian interior ministry denied 50 suspects were at large, claiming that it worked closely with Tunisia to track suspects and had repatriated 35 in 2017.
The ministry said it was also flying home 90 Tunisians a month deemed to be economic migrants, thanks to a bilateral accord with Tunis.
The boats used by Tunisian traffickers to land migrants on Sicilian beaches by night are far more reliable than the overloaded dinghies used by traffickers in Libya, which are only designed to get migrants into international waters, where they often sink.
Prosecutors in Italy suspect some Tunisian migrants are loaded at sea into small boats from mother ships masquerading as fishing boats.
Last August, an abandoned sweat shirt was found on a Sicilian beach with the slogan “Haters Paris” and an upside down Eiffel Tower, a likely reference to the Paris terror attacks in 2015.
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“Among these migrants there may be people coming in linked to international terrorist associations,” prosecutor Luigi Patronaggio said at the time.