Italy: Police Arrest Four on Terrorism Charges Against High Speed Rail

9th Decem­ber  Police on Mon­day arrest­ed four alleged anar­chists in the north­west­ern Pied­mont and the north­ern Lom­bardy regions on ter­ror­ism charges.

The four sus­pects were alleged­ly plan­ning to car­ry out attacks using explo­sives against a high-speed train line cur­rent­ly being built between Italy and France, accord­ing to inves­ti­ga­tors.

Pros­e­cu­tors in Piedmont’s region­al cap­i­tal, Turin ordered the arrests after an attempt­ed attack on 13–14 May at a buid­ing site in Chiomonte in Piedmont’s Valle De Susa using molo­tov cock­tails.

Work began this year on the main 58-kilo­me­tre tun­nel, of which 12 km are in Italy, for the 15 bil­lion euro train-link due to go into ser­vice around 2023.

The line will cut three hours off the cur­rent sev­en-hour train jour­ney between Paris and Milan.

But it has sparked fierce oppo­si­tion includ­ing from res­i­dents, envi­ron­men­tal groups and local may­ors. Pro­test­ers claim drilling to build the train link will dam­age the local ecosys­tem and could release poten­tial­ly harm­ful sub­stances into the envi­ron­ment.

Dozens have been arrest­ed and hun­dreds of demon­stra­tors and police injured in vio­lent protests over the high-speed link and scores of envi­ron­men­tal activists sent to tri­al. Far-left ‘black block’ extrem­ists from Italy and oth­er coun­tries have infil­trat­ed the protest move­ment, acc­cord­ing to police.

In 2010, a bul­let was mailed to Turin may­or Ser­gio Chi­ampar­i­no for his sup­port for the project, which Rome has vowed to com­plete.

Con­struc­tion of the high-speed link in Italy was brought to a stand­still by protests before and after the Turin Win­ter Olympics in 2006.