The arrests are connected with what Italian police said were “terrorist attacks” in Iraq

ROME, November 28 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Italian and German police Friday, November 28, arrested three North Africans as part of a massive anti-terrorism dragnet reportedly connected with what police said were “terrorist attacks” in Iraq.

The arrests followed a confirmation by prosecutors in Milan that they had issued arrest warrants for what they termed “five suspected al-Qaeda activists”, including an Algerian arrested in Germany and a woman nabbed in a dawn raid at Padua, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

They were wanted, among other things, on suspicion of having recruited “suicide attackers” for strikes in Iraq, police sources said.

The prosecutors office in Milan opened a criminal inquiry into leaking of information about the operation "even before it had begun," according to Armando Spataro, head of the anti-terrorism investigation department in the northern city.

The reports contained details from the scores of phone intercepts cited in the arrest warrants.

Spataro said the premature leaking of the information threatened the successful carrying out of the arrest warrants, and he told police and judiciary not to release any more information to the press.

The leaked reports that appeared in Italian newspapers suggested that five alleged “terrorists” already had been detained, rather than that warrants had been issued to arrest them.

The five included the Algerian whom German police said had been arrested in Hamburg at the request of the Italian prosecutors. A police spokeswoman identified him as Mahjub Abderrazak, known as "the sheikh."

He had been detained in July on suspicion of plotting to bomb Spanish holiday resorts, but released for lack of evidence.

The Italian Ansa news agency said police also arrested a Tunisian woman, Farida Bentiwaa Ben Bachir, 42, in a dawn raid in Padua, and detained Moroccan Jamal Housni, a 20-year-old mechanic, in Milan.

But two of the five for whom warrants were issued were still at large, including an Iraqi and a Tunisian citizen, both 33, according to the police sources cited by Ansa.

All were accused of participation in an association to carry out “international terrorism”.

Italian forces serving in Iraq were hit by a “bomb attack” earlier this month when an explosives-laden truck destroyed a police base in the southern Iraqi town of Nasiriyah, leaving 28 people dead including 19 Italians.

It was worst attack on Italian forces since World War II.

In Germany, Focus magazine said Abderrazak knew members of the al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg that allegedly provided three of the hijackers for the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

Arrest In Britain

Within the same line, British police found explosives at a house where a man suspected of al-Qaeda links was arrested Thursday, according to the BBC online news service.

“The 24-year-old, arrested at a house in western England, is being investigated for possible links with British man Richard Reid, who was convicted of trying to blow up a plane with explosives hidden in his shoes,” the BBC added.