Italian police foil new ‘openly pro-Nazi’ party plot

Officers found firearms and propaganda celebrating Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and fascist dictator Benito Mussolini during the series of raids across the country, police said in a statement Thursday. The 19 suspects are under investigation but were not in custody, and police did not name any of them.Authorities had been monitoring "extreme right-wing local militants" during a two-year investigation led by the Anti-Mafia and Antiterrorism District of the Prosecutors Office of Caltanissetta and identified a "vast and jagged galaxy of subjects" who shared the same "ideological fanatism," police said. The group intended to form a "openly pro-Nazi, xenophobic and anti-Semitic group called 'Italian National Socialist Workers' Party,'" police said.Some of the suspects were accused of creating a logo for the party, using social media to recruit others and setting up a closed chat group under the name of "Militia" to train militants, the police statement said.Authorities believe members of the group made contact with neo-Nazi groups in England and Portugal in an attempt to be recognized. In August, a suspect spoke at a far-right conference in Lisbon. The suspect was not named by authorities.Investigators say one of the trainers in the group was a former senior member of the Calabrian mafia organization known as Ndrangheta and had been a former representative for the Forza Nuova neo-fascist party in the western region of Liguria.A 50-year-old woman, who called herself the "Sergeant-Major of Hitler" and a 26-year-old woman frRead More – Source