by John Philips
THE INDEPENDENT

Up to 200 police offi­cers and for­mer intel­li­gence oper­a­tives are being inves­ti­gated by Ital­ian mag­is­trates on charges of organ­is­ing an ille­gal “par­al­lel” police force to com­bat terrorism.

The shad­owy group appears to have set itself up as a pri­vate secu­rity firm, offer­ing pro­tec­tion to senior fig­ures, and illic­itly using offi­cial police resources. Its lead­ers have been accused of “usurp­ing” pub­lic func­tions and ille­gal usie of clas­si­fied data.

Judge Francesco Lalla, Genoa’s chief pros­e­cu­tor, said the self-styled “Depart­ment for Anti-terrorist Strate­gic Stud­ies,” (Dssa) main­tained an arse­nal of weaponry, stored by its accused com­man­ders Gae­tano Saya and Ric­cardo Sin­daco, both with links with the Ital­ian far right. The rev­e­la­tions have height­ened many Ital­ians’ unease about the strate­gies of the gov­ern­ment of Sil­vio Berlus­coni, the Prime Min­is­ter, against Islamist terrorism.

Judi­cial sources said the Dssa recruited from police, para­mil­i­tary cara­binieri, finance police and the armed ser­vices and pre­sented itself to Ital­ian insti­tu­tions as well as poten­tial recruits as an elite body spe­cial­is­ing in fight­ing Islamic and Marx­ist terrorism.

Mr Saya, now under house arrest, had applied for €32m (£21.6m) in Euro­pean Union finance and had allegedly sought con­tact with the Vat­i­can to try to obtain a con­tract to pro­tect of Pope Bene­dict against ter­ror­ist attack.

Mag­is­trates focused on the Dssa after it allegedly claimed to have a video of the mur­der in Iraq of the Ital­ian hostage Fab­rizio Qua­troc­chi and tried to sell the footage. Inves­ti­ga­tors are try­ing to deter­mine what offi­cial sup­port the organ­i­sa­tion may have had.

The Inte­rior Min­is­ter, Giuseppe Pisanu, has sus­pended dozens of police offi­cers who joined the net­work. But Carlo Taormina, an MP from Mr Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, insists Dssa was a bona fide secu­rity com­pany with noth­ing to hide and “the high com­mands of the police and intel­li­gence ser­vices were aware of its existence”.

Il Mes­sag­gero quoted an inves­ti­ga­tor who said it was par­tic­u­larly dis­turb­ing that phone inter­cepts sug­gested Dssa mem­bers had been plan­ning to kid­nap Cesare Bat­tisti, a Red Brigades activist liv­ing in exile in Paris. “We were see­ing the gen­e­sis of some­thing sim­i­lar to the death squads in Argentina,” the mag­is­trate is reported to have said.

The group was charged with mak­ing unau­tho­rised use of inte­rior min­istry data bank infor­ma­tion as well as equip­ping cars with sirens and flash­ing lights and the offi­cial “lol­lipop” sticks, used by Ital­ian police to stop traf­fic or wave as they break traf­fic regulations.

Gilberto Di Benedetto, an asso­ciate of Mr Saya who acted as a mid­dle­man with the Vat­i­can, said most mem­bers had joined the Dssa in good faith, despite its far­ci­cal aspect. “There were peo­ple who were hop­ing for power or to become pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tors, but there also were many police offi­cers and sergeants who believed the Dssa would advance their careers,” he said.

La Repub­blica news­pa­per quoted Michael Scheuer, a for­mer CIA agent and head of the “Bin Laden unit” at CIA head­quar­ters in Lan­g­ley, Vir­ginia, until last Novem­ber, as say­ing the head of Italy’s mil­i­tary intel­li­gence agency Sismi had autho­rised the CIA to abduct Abu Omar, a mil­i­tant Islamic cleric who was flown from Milan to Egypt and report­edly tortured.

Mr Berlusconi’s gov­ern­ment denies knowl­edge of the affair, which became pub­lic after Milan mag­is­trates issued arrest war­rants for 13 CIA agents.