Italian police have arrested five people suspected of having links to a far-left Turkish militant group in the central Italian city of Perugia.
Prosecutors in Peerugia orchestrated the early morning swoop on the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), which is not connected to radical Islamist groups.
Police said raids were also conducted this morning in Turkey and the Netherlands at the request of Italian investigators. A police source in the Netherlands said a raid took place there but no arrests were made. There was no immediate word from Turkey.
"We are not dealing with Islamists. What we have here is a very strong organisation, the DHKP-C, which has a strong Marxist-Leninist tradition," said Giampaolo Ganzer, commander of the crack "Ros" unit of the Carabinieri paramilitary police.
"They have links with anti-imperialist groups in Italy," he said.
Police said five arrests had been made in Italy with further arrest warrants issued for suspects living abroad.
The DHKP-C is the largest of Turkey's far-left factions.
Last year it claimed responsibility for small bomb blasts on a McDonald's restaurant and a state-run hotel in Istanbul, which it said were a protest against the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Nobody was hurt in those attacks.
The DHKP-C also said it carried out a suicide bomb attack in September 2001 in Istanbul that killed two police officers and an Australian tourist, as well as the bomber.
Turkish authorities said the group was also behind an attempted suicide bombing last May in Ankara in which the woman bomber died.
The European Union, which Turkey aspires to join, has placed the DHKP-C on its blacklist of terrorist organisations.