There was a European arrest warrant for a criminal association with terrorist purposes, issued on 23 December by the Paris Court of Appeals for facts committed in France, Italy, Turkey and Syria during 2017. On the evening of 23 December men from the international anti-terrorism section of the Milan Digos and personnel from the air border police at Milan Malpensa airport arrested her at the airport. It is a 35-year-old Italian naturalized Moroccan citizen, held responsible by the French authorities, for having participated in a criminal association active in the preparation of acts of terrorism and for having escaped her legal obligations as a parent to the point of compromising health, the safety, morality and education of her three minor children,

The woman, married to an Italian citizen, residing in Juan Les Pins (France) with her family, last March had just left the house with her three younger children without her husband’s knowledge to reach Syria. Investigations initiated by the French police following the man’s report of disappearance allowed the woman to be identified in the first instance near the Turkish-Syrian border and, subsequently, in Syria in the province of Idlib. After months of silence, the 35-year-old, in November, had contacted her husband to ask him to come and take her and her children back.

The French judicial authorities have requested collaboration from Italy to trace her on Italian territory and to obtain further information. The police of the Milan Digos, coordinated by the deputy prosecutor Alberto Nobili, head of the IV Anti-Terrorism Department of the local Public Prosecutor, in close collaboration with the French authorities, carried out the investigations that allowed the Court of Appeal of Paris to issue in the immediate European arrest warrant borne by the woman. The 35-year-old is now in the San Vittore prison, while the three minor children have been entrusted to her father.

The woman, who gave her willingness to be extradited to France (the hearing will be held on December 29th), said she had gone to Syria to fight because she had fallen in love with a known ISIS representative on the Internet.