A 15th-century fresco showing the naked figure of the prophet Mohammed among the damned in Dante’s “Inferno” is causing a 21st century fuss in the Italian city of Bologna.
But authorities on June 24 denied a report that they had thwarted a plot by a Muslim terrorist cell to attack the Basilica of St. Petronius, where Giovanni da Modena painted the scene from the 28th Canto of the Inferno in the early 1400s.
The Milan newspaper Carriere della Sera said in a front-page story June 23 that the cell, made up of North Africans, intended the attack as a demonstration that Muslim extremists are active in Italy.
The extremists reportedly had links with the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, a dissident faction of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, and were in contact with “Amsa the Libyan,” the alleged European emissary of Osama bin Laden arrested in London on charges of having false documents.
“It’s an invention,” said Massimo Meroni, the magistrate who heads Milan’s anti-terrorism investigations.
Vincenzo Rossetto, head of Bologna’s anti-terrorist squad, said authorities have feared that someone might try to slash or deface the fresco “but never a terrorist attack.”
Dismissed report
Abdel Smith, president of the Union of Muslims in Italy who has led a series of peaceful demonstrations against the fresco for the last year, dismissed the report as an attempt to convince public opinion that Muslims are terrorists. He called the fresco a worse offense to Muslims than Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses.” But, he said, “this does not mean that we are thinking of or planning a vandalistic or terrorist act.”
Smith said he has written to Cardinal Giacomo Biffi of Bologna and Pope John Paul II asking that Mohammed be removed from the fresco or that the writing identifying the nude figure be covered over. He said he has received no reply.
(RNS)
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