Italian police said on Thursday they had arrested a man on a tip from the FBI suspected of preparing pipe bombs and a judge’s order said he had been considering an attack on a kindergarten.
The man, an Italian citizen of Latvian origin, had used social media to praise Sayfullo Saipov, the suspect charged with killing eight people with a speeding truck in New York City last year and perpetrators of other attacks in the United States, according to a police statement and a judge’s order.
The FBI told Italian police about the social media activity, the statement said. A police search of the 24-year-old’s apartment in the city of Viterbo, north of Rome, found material used to assemble pipe bombs.
According to a judge’s detention order seen by Reuters, the man, identified as Denis Illarionovs and born in the Latvian capital, Riga, had written on social media phrases including one that read “it’s time to kill the children in the kindergarten”.
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