Operation Hate: Italy’s Carabinieri Arrest 17-Year-Old Who Was Planning a Neo-Nazi School Attack Italian military police arrested a 17-year-old on Monday morning on terrorism charges after investigations revealed he had been planning a school massacre modelled on the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. The operation, codenamed “Hate,” was conducted by the ROS, the Special Operations Group of the Carabinieri, and involved simultaneous searches across four Italian regions. The teenager, originally from Pescara but resident in a town in the Alto Tevere area of Umbria, faces charges including possession of material with terrorist purposes, as well as incitement to commit crimes on grounds of racial, ethnic and religious discrimination. Investigators found he had been working on the fabrication of weapons and chemical devices, and had been seeking manuals and technical information on the manufacture of explosive devices and firearms. Among the seized material were documents containing technical instructions on dangerous chemical and bacteriological substances, as well as guides to sabotaging essential public services. (…) Investigators established contacts between the teenager and the leadership of a Telegram group called “Werwolf Division,” a virtual environment of neo-Nazi and white supremacist content, where mass killers such as Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque attacks in New Zealand in 2019, and Anders Behring Breivik, responsible for the Oslo and Utøya attacks in Norway in 2011, were described as “saints” to be emulated. The teenager had planned the school attack on the Columbine model, to be followed by his own suicide. Investigators described the broader digital ecosystem as transnational, connecting neo-Nazi, accelerationist and white supremacist groups and channels across multiple countries.
via wantedinrome: Teenager Arrested in Italy for Planning A School Massacre Inspired by Columbine