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Vatican City, Apr 29, 2016 / 02:44 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Italian police arrested four people and issued arrest warrants for two more on Thursday on suspicion of conspiring with the Islamic State terrorist group. One of the arrested suspects was reportedly plotting an attack on the Vatican and the Israeli embassy in Rome.

Authorities said suspect Abderrahim Moutahrrick reportedly received a WhatsApp message from ISIS-held territory that read: “Dear brother Abderrahim, I send you…the bomb poem…listen to the sheik and strike,” possibly referencing ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Moutahrrick was identified by authorities as Moroccan-born but residing in Italy at the time.

Moutahrrick also reportedly told 23-year-old Moroccan-born suspect Abderrahmane Khachia: “I want to hit Israel in Rome.”

According to Reuters, transcripts of a wire-tapped phone conversation between three of the suspects and included in the arrest warrant also mentioned a Vatican attack.

“I swear I will be the first to attack them in this Italy of crusaders, I swear I’ll attack it, in the Vatican God willing,” an arrested suspect is reported as saying to one of the suspects still at large in the transcript.  

Other arrests made in the recent investigation include an Italian-Moroccan couple who travelled to Syria to join ISIS last year. Mohamed Koraichi, one of the couple, is allegedly one of the men from whom Moutahrrick was receiving orders.

Authorities told journalists that Moutahrrick also attempted to purchase weapons from an Albanian fixer in Italy, to whom he stated his intention of a Vatican attack, as well as his plan to take his wife and his two young children to ISIS territory in Syria.

The prosecutor in the case, Maurizio Romanelli of Milan, told Italian news agency ANSA that the recent investigation was different in that it revealed not just generic threats but specific plots involving specific indivituals on Italian and Vatican soil. However, he said that the threats were not imminent and that authorities acted quickly to carry out the arrests.

"Rome attracts attention because it is a destination for Christian pilgrims," he said.

Thus far, Italy has been spared the large-scale terrorist attacks such as those seen in France and Belgium earlier this year. However, authorities have continually made arrests on suspicions of plots to attack Italy.  

Last month, Italian authorities detained a 22-year-old Somali asylum seeker and Imam on suspicion of planning an attack in Rome.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi expressed his thanks on Twitter to the authorities for acting quickly and preventing the attacks.

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New York City, N.Y., Apr 29, 2016 / 03:48 pm (CNA).- (Editor's note: This article includes explicit descriptions of violence. Reader discretion is advised.)

The stories were graphic, brutal and raw.

One account told of a couple whose children had been captured by ISIS militants. When they answered their door one day, they found a plastic bag on their doorstep. It contained the body parts of their daughters and a video of them being raped and tortured.

Another recalled a Christian woman from Mosul who answered the door to find ISIS foreign fighters, demanding that she leave or pay a jizya tax.

She asked for a few seconds, her daughter being in the shower, but the fighters refused to give her the time. They put a torch to the house, burning and eventually killing her daughter.

The girl died in her mother’s arms, but her last words were “Forgive them.”

These were the stories that emerged from a conference on Christian persecution that took place in New York City on Thursday.

Several of the stories were recounted by Jacqueline Isaac, a human rights attorney and vice president of the advocacy group Roads of Success.

Her mother, president of the group, had testified before British Parliament the previous week after having returned from Homs, Syria. Isaac relayed many of her stories, noting both the savage and vicious acts being committed, and the stories of heroism and forgiveness.

“See, in the midst of darkness, there is light, and it is that light that has us sitting here today, because when there is light, there is hope,” she said.

Isaac was one of the speakers at the #WeAreN2016 international congress on religious freedom, which is taking place from April 28-30 in New York City. It is the second annual conference held to bring attention and awareness to the plight of Christians and other persecuted religious minorities, particularly in the Middle East. The “N” stands for the Arabic letter “nun,” spray-painted mockingly onto the houses of Christians in Mosul, Iraq by the Islamic State referring to them as “Nazarenes.”

On Thursday morning, the congress was held at the United Nations headquarters and sponsored by the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the U.N. It featured testimonies on the persecution of Christians from victims of ISIS, missionaries in Syria, and other religious and civic leaders.

Speakers shared horrific descriptions of ISIS atrocities.

Fighting back tears, 15 year-old Samia Sleman told about her six months as an ISIS captive. Speaking through a translator, the Yazidi teenager said that her family was captured in August of 2014. Her father, uncle, and grandfather are all still in ISIS captivity.

Their captors separated the men and the women and took their possessions. For the thousands of women in captivity, they raped the girls as young as seven years old and forced them to convert to Islam. Some of the older women were deemed unworthy to keep as sex slaves and killed.

“Why are these innocent kids and these innocent people suffering this much in that region?” Sleman asked.

“Why don’t we see any action being taken? Even though it’s been over a year and a half now, we’ve seen horrible things happen to use minorities, especially Yazidis and Christians, in that region, and we don’t see the international community taking concrete actions against the Islamic State.”

Recent recognition that a genocide is taking place in the Middle East – by the European Union Parliament, the U.S. State Department, and the British House of Commons – has given hope to the victims, both Isaac and Sleman said.

But more needs to be done.

The next step is for the United Nations Security Council to declare genocide and refer the matter to the International Criminal Court. A petition by the group CitizenGO asking the U.N. to declare genocide and take action to protect the religious freedom of minorities has garnered over 170,000 signatures, and was delivered to U.N. headquarters Friday morning.

The word “genocide” carries deep significance, Isaac insisted. When she testified before the UK Parliament, she brought along a 16 year-old girl who had witnessed inexpressibly barbaric atrocities. The girl had seen her own father murdered before her own eyes, and had witnessed the repeated rape of a nine year-old girl until she died, as well as a mother fed the ground-up remains of her own child by ISIS.

“Though the legal arguments were very important in that parliamentarian decision in the House of Commons,” Isaac said, “it is those stories that moved the House of Commons [to declare genocide].”

And when the body declared that genocide was taking place in Iraq and Syria, the girl cried “oh God, oh God, thank you God, You heard our cries,” saying it was “justice for our people” and their “honor and dignity returned,” Isaac said.

Afterward, she called a mother in Syria whose child had been murdered. “My son’s innocent bloodshed has not been ignored,” the mother responded to the House of Commons move.

“The first step, the first victory, is that healing process,” Isaac said, the proof that “the survivors know” others are supporting them.

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IMAGE: CNS photo/Gregory A. Shemitz

By Daphnie Vega

UNITED NATIONS (CNS) -- While religious freedom in much of the Middle East is under siege and the civil war in Syria seems to have no end in sight, Carl Anderson, CEO of the Knights of Columbus, and others called the United Nations to action.

The U.N. plays a crucial role in securing the future of the region, particularly for people being tortured, kidnapped and killed because of their religious beliefs, Anderson said during a daylong conference April 28.

Anderson's presentation came during one of three panel discussions at the conference sponsored by the office of the Vatican's permanent observer to the U.N. and joined by In Defense of Christians and other organizations focusing on human rights abuses in the Middle East.

Presenters included people who experienced or witnessed atrocities being committed against religious minorities.

Led by remarks from Archbishop Bernardito Auza, the Vatican's permanent observer to the U.N., the event had an intensely sensitive agenda.

A 278-page report submitted to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that was co-authored by the Knights of Columbus and the group In Defense of Christians in March outlined what it called "genocide" being carried out against religious minorities by the Islamic State. Its contents focused largely on Christians who have been murdered and those indigenous communities who will or have been displaced from their region.

On March 17, Kerry designated Islamic State actions as genocide, but the United States has yet to offer a plan to respond.

The U.N. estimates that more than half of Syria's pre-civil war population of about 22.1 million people are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. Four million Syrian refugees now live outside of their homeland. Overall, at least 8 million people have been displaced throughout the region, human rights organizations estimate.

Anderson mentioned published threats in the Islamic State's magazine, Dabiq, specifying what the group has called the "Crusader army" from the West. Such threats have not only been carried out in many parts of the Middle East but have haunted the lives of innocent men, women and children, he said.

The Knights of Columbus has raised more than $10.5 million for relief since 2014 while partnering with dioceses and religious organizations to provide victims with food, clothing, shelter, education and medical attention, he said.

Anderson concluded his presentation by proposing that the U.N. take legal action against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups to prevent the eradication of long-standing and indigenous communities in the Middle East. He called for punishment of the perpetrators and for the establishment of international standards of justice, equality, the rule of law and religious freedom.

Sister Maria de Guadalupe Rodrigo, a member of the Congregation of the Incarnate Word who has spent 18 years in the Middle East as a missionary, spoke of her experienced living in Aleppo, Syria, a major battleground in the civil war.

"I remember the first two months when this all started, we all remained inside," she said. "There were constant explosions and gunshots. We couldn't sleep. But these weeks turned into months and the months into years."

Sister Maria de Guadalupe described how children playing on the street collect bullets and trade them with one another because they could find nothing else to play with. Children should not be concerned about safety, but safety is all they think about, she said.

A child captured and tortured by ISIS also addressed the conference. Samia Sleman, 15, of Hardan, Iraq, a village north of Mount Sinjar, gave an emotional speech about her time in captivity. A member of the Yazidi minority, Sleman spent six months sequestered along with other girls who were starved, raped and sold to other Islamic State members.

Sleman brought attention to the many girls whom Islamic State members take as sex slaves while their mothers are killed for being "too old." Some enslaved girls are as young 7 or 8 years old, she said.

Despite the horrific actions of her captors, Sleman, whose family is still being held, spoke on their behalf so the U.N. and world governments would act to end the genocide taking place.

In another session, Jacqueline Isaac, vice president of Roads of Success, a Southern California organization addressing human rights in the Middle East, asked, "Where are you, world?"

Victims of ISIS are more than numbers, but human beings, she said, as many in the audience rose to their feet and applauded.

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(Vatican Radio)  Venezuela’s opposition coalition has begun the first stage of a referendum intended to end Nicolas Maduro's Presidency within the year.

Listen to James Blears' report:

Venezuela's Constitution states that a President can be recalled and if this is done in the first four years of the six year term, elections would then be held. 

President Nicolas Maduro has just passed the half-way mark, which is three years.

The opposition has already had little difficulty collecting 600,000 signatures and is aiming for a million before offically handing them in next week.

This easily exceedes the initial target figure of one percent of registered voters, which is 200,000 signatures.

But the political gradiant from here on in gets harder and steeper. Stage two requires twenty percent of registered voters, which is around four million signatures, and it would have to be collected within three days.

Stage three would be at least equal to the original votes cast for the election of Nicolas Maduro, which excedes seven million.

The level of dissatisfaction nationwide is simmering with inflation at world record levels, with shortages of food and basic commodities, and now electrical power cuts have occurred, due to drought. 

Most of Venezuela's revenues come from petroleum, and international oil prices have nosedived.

Undaunted and unbowed, President Maduro is vowing he'll serve his full term of office.

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