Poland Thwarts Planned Attacks on Muslims

Police officers investigate the site of a stabbing in Warsaw, Poland, April 11, 2019. Agencja Gazeta/Adam Stepien via REUTERS
Police officers investigate the site of a stabbing in Warsaw, Poland, April 11, 2019. Agencja Gazeta/Adam Stepien via REUTERS
TT

Poland Thwarts Planned Attacks on Muslims

Police officers investigate the site of a stabbing in Warsaw, Poland, April 11, 2019. Agencja Gazeta/Adam Stepien via REUTERS
Police officers investigate the site of a stabbing in Warsaw, Poland, April 11, 2019. Agencja Gazeta/Adam Stepien via REUTERS

Two members of an "extremist group" suspected of planning bomb and gun attacks on Muslims have been arrested in Poland, the security services announced Wednesday.

Officers arrested the two suspects in Warsaw and in the northwest city of Szczecin, Stanislaw Zaryn, of the country's internal security service (ABW), told Agence France Presse.

They seized chemicals that could have been used to make large quantities of explosives after searching locations in the center, south and northwest of the country.

"The arrests are the result of an intelligence-gathering exercise by the ABW about an extremist group whose aim was to terrorize people" of the Muslim faith in Poland, said a statement from the agency.

"These are the first two arrests of members of this group, which was preparing acts of violence in Poland," Zaryn said.

While he did not name the group involved in this new plot or go into details of what they were planning, he said they had been inspired by attacks carried out by right-wing extremists Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant.

Breivik used a truck bomb and then guns to kill 77 people, many of them young people, in Norway in July 2011.

Australian Tarrant killed or wounded dozens of Muslims in an attack on two mosques in New Zealand in March this year.

There are around 20,000 Muslims in Poland, a country of 38 million people, most of them Catholic.



Italian Journalist Cecilia Sala Released from Iran and Returning Home

This photograph taken in Pordenone on September 16, 2023, shows Italian journalist Cecilia Sala posing for a photo at the Pordenonelegge Literature Festival in Pordenone. (ANSA/AFP)
This photograph taken in Pordenone on September 16, 2023, shows Italian journalist Cecilia Sala posing for a photo at the Pordenonelegge Literature Festival in Pordenone. (ANSA/AFP)
TT

Italian Journalist Cecilia Sala Released from Iran and Returning Home

This photograph taken in Pordenone on September 16, 2023, shows Italian journalist Cecilia Sala posing for a photo at the Pordenonelegge Literature Festival in Pordenone. (ANSA/AFP)
This photograph taken in Pordenone on September 16, 2023, shows Italian journalist Cecilia Sala posing for a photo at the Pordenonelegge Literature Festival in Pordenone. (ANSA/AFP)

An Italian journalist detained in Iran since Dec. 19 and whose fate became intertwined with that of an Iranian engineer wanted by the United States was freed Wednesday and is heading home, Italian officials announced.

A plane carrying Cecilia Sala took off from Tehran after “intensive work on diplomatic and intelligence channels,” Premier Giorgia Meloni’s office said, adding that Meloni had informed Sala's parents of the news.

There was no immediate word from the Iranian government on the journalist’s release.

Sala, a 29-year-old reporter for the Il Foglio daily, was detained in Tehran on Dec. 19, three days after she arrived on a journalist visa. She was accused of violating the laws of the country, the official IRNA news agency said.

Italian commentators had speculated that Iran was holding Sala as a bargaining chip to ensure the release of Mohammad Abedini, who was arrested at Milan’s Malpensa airport three days before on Dec. 16, on a US warrant.

The US Justice Department accused him and another Iranian of supplying the drone technology to Iran that was used in a January 2024 attack on a US outpost near the Syrian-Jordanian border that killed three American troops.

He remains in detention in Italy.