Italian state police arrested an Algerian citizen in Italy’s southern city of Bari Monday who is suspected of belonging to Islamic State and providing help for the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 130 people. Police identified the 36-year-old Algerian as Athmane Touami, also known as Tomi Mahraz. According to investigators, Touami gave direct support for the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks at the Bataclan concert hall, the Stade de France, and in three boroughs of Paris on Nov. 13, 2015. The Paris attacks in which hundreds more people were wounded, were France’s deadliest since World War II. Touami is also believed to have provided counterfeit documents to the gunmen and bombers who participated in the attacks, a statement by the Bari police said. Athmane Touami, his brothers Medhi and Lyes, and several other individuals, some of them not yet identified, had been operating in Italy and Algeria, as well as in France, Belgium, Spain and Syria, with links to radical jihadist circles, the statement said. Athmane Touami has been in prison in Bari since 2019, because while in the Temporary Detention Center for migrants in Bari, he was found in possession of false documents used to move freely in the countries of the Schengen zone. He was tried and sentenced to two years in prison, and due for release on June 19, 2021.
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