WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 (UPI) -- Another Web site's threat to Italy from its nemesis, the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigade: On Thursday, the organization suspected of links with al-Qaida warned the Italian people to get rid of "that incompetent (Prime Minister Silvio) Berlusconi, otherwise we will really burn Italy."
The message is the latest in a series from the Brigade since early July. It differs from earlier warnings in demanding the removal of Italy's conservative prime minister instead of the withdrawal of Italy's forces from Iraq. But this is possibly because the military pullout was already the subject of the earlier warnings by the group in July.
Although other members of the U.S.-led coalition have been warned on various Web sites that carry what are claimed to be al-Qaida messages, only Berlusconi is singled out with such persistence. Thursday's message hinted for the first time a possible reason. It recalled Berlusconi's remark last January that Western civilization was superior to Islam. The observation drew protests from Islamic groups in Europe at the time, but Muslims felt that the prime minister never satisfactorily retracted it.
"We are not the bloodthirsty beasts or stupid extremists that Berlusconi's mass media describe," the message went on. "But we are sure that Berlusconi's media want you to believe that ours are idle threats. ... Don't be deceived by their words -- and get rid of the superiority complex towards Islam."
Italian reports quoted unnamed Italian intelligence sources as saying they regarded the message as genuine. The sources said all the posted warnings were written by the same person. "They describe him as a North African, probably Moroccan, who knew Italy well," the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera reported Thursday.
The Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigade gained notoriety earlier this year when it claimed responsibility for the Madrid train bombings on March 11. Spanish investigators subsequently arrested more than a dozen Moroccans in connection with the terrorist attack in which 190 commuters died and thousands were injured.
Italy's minister of the interior, Giuseppe Pisanu, said that for the moment the messages were regarded more as scare tactics than real threats, but the government still took them seriously. "It's a case of the citizens being able to sleep undisturbed, but not the minister of the interior," Pisanu said in a television interview.
A major fear of the Italian authorities is that militants could attack one of the Italy's many historical sites and undermine the vital tourist industry. The prefect of Rome, the official responsible for law and order and security, gave an idea of the dimension of the problem recently when he pointed out that in the Italian capital alone there were more than 5,000 "potential terrorist targets."
The other novelty about the latest message is that it also hints at long-rumored ties between militants and Chechnya. Reports of al-Qaida members fighting in the Russian separatist province have been circulating since before the Afghan war. The Brigade's message refers to "the (Italian) journalist Antonio Russo, who was killed by (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's intelligence apparatus simply because he was sharing the suffering of our brothers in Chechnya."
An investigative journalist for Radio Radicale, Russo was found dead nearly four years ago in Georgia, 15 miles from the capital Tiblisi. He had been covering the Chechen conflict for several months.
Italy's nearly 3,000 troops in Iraq are deployed in and around Nasiriya. All this week they have come under frequent attack from Moqtada Sadr's militia, but have suffered no casualties. Berlusconi -- a strong ally of the Bush administration -- has repeatedly said that Italy will remain in Iraq as long as it takes to hold free elections and to bring stability to the troubled country.
Even so, the continuous threats from terrorist groups have led to more calls from the opposition and the media to bring the troops back home. Berlusconi's often flamboyant rhetoric seems to arouse Islamic extremists -- among others.
On Wednesday, another Web site carried a warning from a relatively unknown group calling itself the Abu Bakr al-Seddiq Brigade. It said, "We've made a list of European leaders, and at the top of it is the enemy of Allah, Berlusconi."
