(12 Jul 2017) Italy's plan to reduce the risk of a jihadist-inspired attack is pinned in small part on El Hacmi Mimoun, an imam who bikes to the prison every week and exhorts Muslim inmates not to stray from life's "right path" or hate people who aren't Muslim.
Seven Terni Penitentiary inmates - three Moroccans, three Tunisians and a Somali - left their cells on an early summer day to listen as the Moroccan-born imam led prayers and delivered a sermon.
Sunlight from a high barred window streamed through Mimoun's gauzy, off-white robe.
"If I'm praying, as a practicing Muslim, I am not thinking about harming someone else outside, it doesn't come to my mind," a 35-year-old Tunisian inmate said, sitting cross-legged in the small, beige-tiled room that was converted into the prison's Mosque of Peace.
So far spared the attacks that have stunned France, Belgium, Britain and Germany, Italy has relied mostly on arresting and deporting suspected extremists to try to keep the country safe.
But the Italian government has come to embrace prevention, too, especially in the prisons it does not want to become training grounds for potential terrorists.
Inviting in imams who have been vetted to make sure they espouse ''moderate views'' is a tactic now being employed in Italian prisons to counter radicalisation among inmates.
In February, the government signed a recruiting agreement with the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy, which professes to foster Islamic "pluralism.''
"We have seen that jail is a weak point, where the probability of a prisoner becoming a radical is very high UCOII's president," Izzeddin Elzir, said.
Italy's second generation of Muslim immigrants is just coming of age now.
For the most part, the nation lacks neighbourhoods with heavy concentrations of Muslim residents.
But Muslims make up a disproportionate share of the population in Italy's prisons.
More than a third of all inmates in Italian penitentiaries are foreigners, and 42 percent of those come from the majority Muslim countries of Morocco, Albania and Tunisia, according to a 2017 report by the inmate advocacy NGO Antigone.
The advocacy group counted 411 chaplains, but only 47 imams working in Italy's 200 prisons.
Prison system officials worry if imam don't make regular visits, inmates might be more vulnerable to the influence of those who are already radicalised.
Justice Ministry Undersecretary Gennaro Migliore stressed in an interview that of some 11,000 Italian prison inmates from predominantly Muslim countries, "those who could be potentially radicalised, or already radicalised don't exceed 400'' inmates.
The government's agreement with UCOII should make more imams available to tend to the spiritual needs of Muslim prisoners, said Elzir, a Palestinian who started preaching in a Florence prison in 1993.
So far, 13 UCOII imams have started preaching in eight prisons after being screened by interior ministry officials.
Government officials and the organisation plan to evaluate the strategy's effectiveness as a de-radicalisation tool this autumn.
If Italy needed a wakeup call, it came with the morning news two days before Christmas.
Before dawn, officers in Milan confronted and killed a young Tunisian suspected of driving the truck that ploughed through shoppers at a Berlin Christmas market that week, killing 12.
Amri is believed to have become radicalised during the three-and-a-half years he spent in Italian prisons for his role in a riot at a migrant centre.
And inmates are catching on to what tips prison personnel off, Gallo said.
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