Abdelaziz Chaouachi
Abdelaziz Ben Amor Ben Bechir Chaouachi, alias Shafi, was born on September 17, 1973 in Tunis. At the time of the investigation he was living in Como. Chaouachi was part of an extremist criminal network highly active in the forgery of documents and involved with the running of a jihadist paramilitary training camp in Afghanistan. Some members of the network had direct links to the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), and others, such as Chaouachi himself, had participated in the war in Bosnia among the Mujahidin Brigade.
His identification as a suspect was made after a raid on Dah Dah (alias of Essaadi Moussa) on February 25, 1998. Dah Dah was one of the main individuals involved in document forgery, and two passport photos of Chaouachi were found in his house. Further inquiries by Italian authorities revealed that Chaouachi had been stopped and searched at the border with Slovenia in 1995, exhibiting an Italian ID. Later he had been arrested by the Pakistani police, to whom he would admit both to have shown false documents to Slovenian authorities and that after passing through Slovenia he went on to fight with the mujahidin in Bosnia.
Once identified, further controls revealed that he was using two different phone sims, one of which (seized during the raid at Dah Dah’s house) was shared with the fugitive Hammami Hedi Ben Hedili (alias Abu Dar) and the other was shared with Dah dah. He was also found to be in contact with other investigated individuals, such as Abdaoui Youssef and Saleh Nedal (another mujahidin who had fought in Bosnia). In addition to coordinating with his clients and Dah Dah for the forgery of documents, Chaouachi was also found to keep in contact with high-level members of other radicalist networks and cells operating in northern Italy.
Between December 1997 and January 1998, Chaouachi had many cryptic calls with Abu Dar and other unidentified individuals, in which he seemed to try and organise different meetings. Then, in a call with Abdaoui Youssef, he stated he had booked a flight to Karachi in Pakistan. From the conversation, it is clear that once in Karachi Chaouachi was supposed to go to Peshawar to meet someone Abu Dar calls “Seif”, likely referring to Seif Eddine, one of the managers of the aforementioned paramilitary training camp in Afghanistan. In the phone call, they also mentioned the arrest of an acquaintance of theirs who had also gone to Pakistan. Later inspections revealed that Chaouachi had departed from Zurich.
In a call on March 30, 1998, Abu Dar and Ben Ali Lofti confirmed that Chaouachi had arrived in Pakistan. They talked about the military training, religious studies, and problems that the group was facing in Afghanistan.
From another investigation of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Milan emerged that Chaouachi was a “usual occupant” of a flat in that city (as such he was also being investigated by that office). A flat he shared with many other individuals, one of whom, Fezzani Moez, was part of this network, and another being Aouni Bachir, a leader of the GIA in Germany. Bugs planted in the apartment revealed that the occupants in the period between April and July 1998 talked openly about bombmaking, and radicalism, and even praised a successful and deadly terrorist attack in Algeria.
With this information, the Court of Bologna requested Chaouachi’s arrest in March of 2000.
