Order of Hagal, is the name of the neo-Nazi organization which ended up at the center of media attention after the arrest, on November 15, of four of its members by the Italian police. The investigation began in 2019 when authorities suspected neo-Nazi groups of planning acts of terrorism in Italy. Today, arrested members of the Order of Hagal were impeached for the planning terrorist attacks against civilian and police targets. The authorities have collected numerous pieces of evidence against the organization and its members, such as Nazi propaganda materials, weapons, tactical clothing, but also telephone tapping between members of the group. Police determined that Hagal’s Order has tightened relations with the Azov battalionas with other extremist and neo-Nazi components, and one of the accused is currently in Ukraine fighting right alongside Azov.
Maurizio Ammendola, Michele Rinaldi, Giampiero Testa and Massimiliano Mariano, are the four Italian citizens arrested in the cities of Naples, Caserta and Avellino; Anton Radomosky, a twenty-seven year old Ukrainian originally from Ternopil, but domiciled in Italy, in Marigliano, is the man under accusation but who is currently in Ukraine fighting together with the Azov battalion. In addition, the authorities also carried out 26 personal, home and computer searches in the provinces of Naples, Avellino, Caserta, Milan, Turin, Palermo, Ragusa, Treviso, Verona, Salerno, Potenza, Cosenza and Crotone, paid by as many people belonging to the network of contacts of the neo-Nazi organization. As the police recalled through its statement, today’s arrests and searches follow the 30 already carried out between May and October 2021.
Those arrested are accused of association with the aim of terrorism or subversion of the democratic order. They allegedly “set up, organised, promoted and financed a criminal association, also operating through the dissemination of the website of the Order of Hagal association and the use of other social media, aimed at carrying out violent subversive acts, instigating a crime, apology and denial, with the aim of terrorism and subversion of the democratic order, directed and capable of violently subverting the economic and social as well as the political and legal systems of the State, having a neo-Nazi, supremacist character and purpose and of racial, ethnic, and religious”. The accusation also concerns the “propaganda of ideas based on racial and ethnic superiority and hatred, and instigation to commit acts of discrimination and violence for racial and ethnic reasons, also based on the serious minimization and apology of the Holocaust” .
According to wiretaps, in 2021, Giampiero Testa and Anton Radomsky were planning a armed attack on a police station in Marigliano, in Naples, as well as, always in the same city, in the shopping centre “Good volcano”. “Protocol 4” was the name of a Telegram channel that the organization used to spread neo-Nazi and anti-Jewish propaganda and through which it proselytized. According to the investigators, the neo-Nazi organization practiced paramilitary training in the provinces of Naples and Caserta. In addition, members of the Order of Hagal had undergone training courses in krav maga and in the use of sidearms and firearms in Israel and the Ukraine. In this regard, contacts in the Ukraine had been made with the Azov battalionPravyj Sektor (Right Sector), Misantrophic Division and Centuria.
Therefore, the neo-Nazi organization Order of Hagal is just another piece, a small node that adds to that network that we de The Independentin an in-depth investigation last May, we defined Black International. The global neo-Nazi network, which for some years has had its epicenter in Ukraine, is fighting against Russia but also considers itself an alternative to the West, NATO and the European Union. According to the ideologues and members of such groups, their revolution, what they call Third Way“is moving towards the new world order, new values and new metaphysics of the West”.
This phenomenon, as highlighted by the investigation we conducted, poses, among others, two problems: the return to their own country of foreign fighters in Ukraine and belonging to neo-Nazi groups; the quantity and quality of weapons received from the West to fight against Russia. The Intercept defined the first question as a “time bomb” while for the second fact, Juergen Stock, general secretary of Interpol, stated last June: “The high availability of weapons during the current conflict will lead to the proliferation of illicit weapons in the post-conflict phase”.
[di Michele Manfrin]
