ROME: A Pakistani man Aftab Farook expelled from Italy for allegedly plotting an attack in the name of the Islamic State (IS) militant group used to captain the Italian youth cricket team, media reports said on Wednesday.
Aftab was caught on a wire-tap talking about using a Kalashnikov or bomb to attack targets such as a wine shop in Milan or the airport of Bergamo in northern Italy, saying that the important thing was to scare Europeans, Italian newspapers reported.
On Tuesday, Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said that the 26-year-old Aftab supported the Islamic State group and was planning to go to Syria to join militants. The news stunned locals in Vaprio d’Adda near Milan, where Aftab had lived with his family since he was 13 years old.
Photos published in 2009 by Sportweek, a weekly insert in Italy’s Gazzetta dello Sport daily, and re-issued in the media on Wednesday, showed him as the captain of the under-19s national team, wearing the Italian colours in international competitions.
“It hit us like lightning out of the blue, I still don’t believe it,” Fabio Marabini, president of the Kingsgrove Milano cricket club and a close paternal figure to Farook, told La Stampa daily. “I spoke to him just before they put him on the flight for Islamabad. He thanked me for everything I’ve done for him over the years and he told me he was scared, because he no longer has any ties in Pakistan.”
Aftab, who worked for the sporting goods retailer Decathlon, was keen on snowboarding with his friends and volunteered in his spare time as a driver of a bus for disabled people, La Stampa said. Marabini said, “He would never have hurt a fly. He was made captain of the national team precisely because he was a trustworthy person, always ready to help others.”
Citing the investigative report drawn up by anti-mafia police, however, La Stampa said that he had changed over the past year or so, and had begun beating his wife and forcing her to wear a burqa (hijab). He was expelled from Italy on Wednesday but his family plan to challenge the extradition at the European Court of Human Rights, the reports said.
In another development, another man of Pakistani-origin has been jailed in Norway alleged of being a militant. An Oslo court jailed two militants on Wednesday, of Pakistani and Chechen origin, for six and seven and a half years respectively for joining the Islamic State group in Syria.
Hasan Ahmed, a 46-year-old Norwegian of Pakistani origin, and Adam Idrisovich Magomadov, a 23-year-old Russian of Chechen origin were convicted of belonging to the Islamic State and of “terror conspiracy.” The two men, who had been living in the South-eastern Norway, travelled together to Syria in August 2014, a little more than a month after the militant group declared a caliphate in an area straddling Iraq and Syria.
While there, the two took part in the Islamic State training programmes, vowed allegiance to the group, and bore weapons in its name, the court found. Magomadov was handed a heavier sentence because he stayed in Syria longer. The court found it likely that he had taken part in combat that he had maintained ties with the militant group after returning to Norway, and that he, like his co-accused, planned to return to Syria.
Ahmed, whose son Ishaq was also sentenced to eight years in prison in Norway last year for joining the Islamic State group, would appeal the conviction, while Magomadov had not yet decided, their lawyers said. Their sentences were in line with those requested by the prosecution.