He was spending a few days of holiday at the seaside in Tuscany with his family, like any teenager of his age. A sixteen-year-old, Italian of foreign origins residing in the province of Como, was arrested in Grosseto by the Digos of Milan. International terrorism, propaganda in support of ISIS and incitement to commit crimes for reasons of racial, ethnic and religious discrimination are the charges against him. According to the investigating judge for minors in Milan, Laura Margherita Pietrasanta, he was "ready to join ISIS".
The investigation was triggered following a report from the AISI, the internal intelligence agency, regarding a user registered on an instant messaging platform who, through various profiles, spread propaganda content of a jihadist, neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic nature. The first investigative investigations have made it possible to trace all the profiles back to the young suspect, who has no precedents and who until now had never been identified in radical circles. The police then traced back to a profile used by the minor with clear references to the Islamic State and several chats where he shared jihadist, neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic content.
Among the numerous videos seized from the teenager there is one in Russian, a language understandable by the sixteen-year-old, with the Islamic State logo and instructions for manufacturing an improvised explosive device using easily available materials. Signs that immediately triggered the arrest, with the precautionary measure in prison for the young man, who had no criminal record but who, according to the investigators, is in an advanced stage of the radicalization process. The boy also interacted with subjects organic to Daesh through various profiles which were obscured and protected by the use of VPN and tools. "If I were two years older, I would be one of them," he says in a conversation - reported in the precautionary custody order - on the Discord app, where he shared videos of "beheadings, scenes of executions" and of armed people next to the bodies of the victims as if "they were war trophies". In another interception, again on Discord, in greeting his interlocutor the 16-year-old uses the expression "Heil Hitler" and then shares a video depicting two subjects in a closed room, in the background an ISIS flag according to the now well-known phenomenon of 'white jihad', the mix of elements attributable to jihadist extremism and white supremacism. In yet another, the young man says that "if the munasir (i.e. sympathizers of the Islamic state) had contacted or reached him, he would have tried to help them in any way". Words which confirm, says the investigating judge, "the desire" of the young man "to join the fighters" of ISIS, an objective for which he was "concretely preparing".
In the order the judge highlights how the disputed facts are of "extreme gravity". It was "established", the document reports, that the young man "showing particular cunning and obstinacy, permanently entered groups sharing extremist material (both Islamic and supremacist), sharing their ideologies, downloading and sharing content and holding conversations with users of marked social alarm". The story recalls what happened less than a month ago in the province of Pavia, where a 17-year-old Italian girl was arrested by the police on charges of international terrorism. She too, like the sixteen-year-old from Como, kept a manual on her smartphone for making an explosive belt and, chatting with users attributable to jihadist circles, expressed her desire for martyrdom in the name of Allah.
