As American Security Today’s Editorial Director, I am excited to travel to Italy: Rome & Pompeii on August 27-31, and I am just dying to get on the plane!
Among us will be former presidential and governor appointees; wellness, media, tech entrepreneurs; foundation executives; in a growing community of women in business and wellness across the United States.
Italy’s capital is a sprawling cosmopolitan city with nearly 3,000 years of globally influential art, architecture and culture on display, and I look forward to walking Roman streets to find unidentified sites with multiple levels of underground construction silently telling stories spanning over 28 centuries.
However, our foremost goal of the trip is to meet with Italian homeland security and law enforcement representatives, to gather knowledge and open discourse as to their country’s ongoing efforts to prevent violence and mitigate threats to the eternal city’s civilians, communities, organizations and country.
Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini recently delivered a stark warning: “Islamic terrorist infiltration is no longer a risk—it has become a certainty.”
Although it appears that Italy has largely dodged the carnage Islamist terrorists have afflicted on some of its neighbors, the case of a Senegalese native angry over Italy’s migrant policy hijacked a bus with 51 children and their chaperones in March, and took them on an hour-long drive before setting the vehicle ablaze, officials said.
The man, reportedly in his 40s, took the bus carrying two middle-school classes in Cremona province, about 25 miles from Milan, and drove for an hour before authorities intercepted the vehicle using three Carabinieri vehicles.
(Raw video shows the aftermath of bus fire started by hijacker. The driver, who is a citizen of Italy, allegedly said he wanted to kill himself and “stop the deaths in the Mediterranean,” ANSA reported. Courtesy of euronews and YouTube. Posted on Mar 21, 2019.)
“While two officers kept the driver busy — he took a lighter and threatened to set fire to the vehicle with a gasoline canister on board — the others forced open the back door,” Commander Luca De Marchis told Sky24TV.
The driver started the blaze as officers broke the glass in the back door of the bus, allowing the passengers to escape before flames engulfed the entire vehicle.
Video above, of the incident’s aftermath shows the buses a charred metal frame.
American Security Today in Italy
As part of our trip we will step into the ancient ruins of the Forum and the Colosseum, the largest amphitheater ever built, St. Peter’s Basilica, and the Vatican Museum among Michelangelo’s masterpiece frescoes at the Sistine Chapel.
I cannot wait to be mesmerized by Pompeii, once a thriving and sophisticated Roman city, which rose from the ashes after being buried for sixteen centuries by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.
I look forward to discussing the unique security challenges and preventative measures used to ensure these site’s visitors safety with local security forces, and will be sharing this information with our government, homeland security and public safety professionals along the way on our social media platform, and in articles to follow.
