Italians Release Details on Suspects

Italian police released information Monday about nine Moroccan immigrants who were ordered held on charges of subversive association after a judge agreed that they may have been plotting to send lethal gas into the U.S. Embassy or to poison its water supply.

But after interrogating the Moroccans for nearly a week, police told U.S. officials that the suspects had offered nothing to build on evidence found in one of the men’s apartments: a bag containing nearly 9 pounds of a cyanide compound and a map highlighting water pipes feeding the embassy complex in central Rome.

Police identified the renter of the suburban apartment as Aziz Jamile, a 32-year-old pizza chef. He and his four roommates were arrested. Another key suspect, police said, was Zinedine Tarik, a 37-year-old manager of a telephone exchange here for immigrants who want to call or wire money home. Tarik and two others were seized at another apartment.

Jamile and Tarik have Italian work permits, and a third key suspect has a tourist visa. All but one of the others are illegal immigrants, police said. The latter group made a living selling cheap consumer goods in the street. One suspect aspired to a soccer career. Their ages range from 21 to 44.

Italian officials have not spoken publicly about evidence against the men, who were rounded up between Feb. 14 and Sunday. But the Italian news agency ANSA said police had depicted them as foot soldiers who were preparing the ground for an attack by more sophisticated but still unidentified terrorists, possibly linked to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network.

Suspicion about a deadly plot grew Sunday when Italian newspapers reported the discovery of a hole, big enough for a slender adult to crawl through, in the concrete wall of a utility tunnel under a street flanking the embassy. The tunnel was marked on the suspects’ map, and Italian media said the hole appeared only in recent weeks.

Embassy officials, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, said the hole was discovered a day after police raided the Jamile apartment last week and seized 20 pounds of firecrackers and the bag of potassium ferrocyanide. The compound can produce a lethal gas when heated.

At a hearing Sunday for eight of the men, all denied being terrorists. Their lawyers said that the suspects did not know anything about the potassium ferrocyanide and that the firecrackers had been left over from New Year’s Eve festivities.

But Judge Fabrizio Gentili said he was keeping the Moroccans behind bars because they could not explain the utility map, which shows where underground pipes enter the embassy complex. The judge said the men might have been planning to “carry out acts of indiscriminate fanaticism.”

“Is that possible?” said a U.S. official who was asked to comment on the judge’s statement. “Yes, absolutely. Do we have any evidence that would confirm that? No, not yet.”

Elizabetta Gentile, a defense lawyer for the Moroccans, said it was hard to define them as fanatics because, although they are Muslims, “they are not practicing Muslims. They drink wine and eat pork.”

Italian media reports over the weekend spread alarm in the American diplomatic community. Hundreds of embassy personnel gathered Monday to hear U.S. Ambassador Mel Sembler appeal for calm and voice “full confidence in the Italians and our own security people.”

Two State Department security experts arrived in Rome to join Italian police in inspecting the utility tunnel today to assess the threat of an attack on the mission from there.

The concrete pipe tunnel, under Via Boncompagni, is accessible by manholes. For safety and security reasons, each end is sealed by a 3-foot-thick concrete wall. Someone had chipped through the top of one of these walls and left a space about 2 feet high, U.S. officials said.

But the officials said it was not clear whether the hole was made by an intruder after the most recent inspection of the tunnel by utility crews or was left over from previous maintenance work.

Even if terrorists had entered the tunnel, one official said, “it would have been difficult in the extreme” to cause any harm from there. The tunnel is a conduit for telephone and electrical wiring, which enters the embassy compound through smaller branches, each of them too small for a human to enter.

The official said the tunnel does not contain gas or water lines, which enter the embassy through nearby trenches.

In any case, potassium ferrocyanide is harmless dissolved in water.