ROME, Oct. 9 (Xinhua) -- The brother of a terrorist who stabbed two young women to death in France was arrested in the northern city of Ferrara on Saturday night, Italian State Police said in a statement on Monday.
The Tunisian national named Anis Hannachi was picked up on an international arrest warrant issued by France. He is accused of being an accessory to the murder of two French women in the southern French city of Marseille on Oct. 1, according to the police.
His brother, Ahmed Annachi, killed cousins Mauranne, 21, a medical student, and 20-year-old nursing student Laura, at a railway station in full daylight. He was shot and killed by police shortly after his rampage, which was claimed by the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group.
French investigators had trouble identifying the slain suspect at first because "at least seven different identities corresponded to his fingerprints," according to French newspaper Le Figaro.
Paris Chief Prosecutor Francois Molins told reporters at a press conference that the dead terrorist had a police record for petty crimes "going back to 2005", according to a video posted online by French paper Le Monde.
Italian investigators believe the man arrested, Anis Annachi, spent time as a "foreign fighter" in the ranks of IS in Iraq and Syria, and indoctrinated his brother to commit terrorist acts in the name of Islam, police stated.
Anis Annachi had no papers at the time of his arrest and was identified thanks to fingerprints. He was not known to police as a radical Islamist, and was rejected at the border when he tried to enter Italy in 2014 because he was undocumented, Police Antiterrorism Director Lamberto Giannini told reporters at a televised news conference on Monday.
The arrest of the Marseille attacker's brother was the result of a joint Italy-France operation, police said.
Also on Monday, Italian news agency ANSA reported that anti-terrorist police have arrested a 33-year-old Italian man who claimed he placed a bomb in a sewer in a central location of the northern city of Brescia. The man "used to be a radical Catholic and subsequently espoused the cause of IS," according to ANSA. However, no bomb was discovered in Brescia, Ansa said.
