ROME: Italian police said Wednesday they had arrested a Moroccan suspected of involvement in the March attack on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis in which 21 tourists were killed.
Abdel Majid Touil, 22, was arrested on an international warrant by Italy’s anti-terrorism DIGOS police in the northern town of Gaggiano, officers told a press conference.
Touil, who is wanted for premeditated murder, kidnapping and terrorism according to the police, was detained on Tuesday evening. An illegal immigrant to Italy, he was living with his mother, a carer and two older brothers, who are legally resident in the town near Milan.
The Bardo attack on March 18 killed 22 people, including a Tunisian policeman and tourists from Italy, Japan, France, Spain, Colombia, Australia, Britain, Belgium, Poland and Russia.
Tourists getting off buses outside the museum were gunned down by two black-clad gunmen with automatic weapons, who then took hostages inside the building.
Many people were shot in the back as they tried to escape. After rampaging through the museum for several hours, the two gunmen were killed in an assault by security forces.
Tunisia’s President Beji Caid Essebsi said a few days after the attack that a third gunman was on the run but it later emerged he may have been referring to an accomplice, who was not at the scene of the shooting.
The country’s interior ministery told AFP on Wednesday that it had “issued international arrest warrants for two Moroccans and an Algerian with an indirect link” to the attack, but did not specify if the man arrested in Italy was one of them.
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