Milan, 16 years old, July 2025. Cantù, province of Como, January 2026, same age. Montepulciano, Tuscany, 15 years old, last May. Vimercate, Monza e Brianza, early June. Most recently, Villanterio, Pavia, 17 years old: yesterday. Another minor has been discovered frequenting jihadist chats, downloading material with instructions for making homemade weapons, and writing messages swearing she was ready to strike. This time it’s a girl, an Italian citizen.

The Milan juvenile prosecutor’s office, which led the investigation, does not specify her parents’ origin. She had managed to gain access to invitation-only conspirator groups. She praised ISIS. She had written that she was ready to carry out a suicide attack. This particularly alarmed the Digos (Italy’s counter-terrorism police), who also found on her devices a manual for building an explosive belt.

The preliminary investigations judge granted the arrest request made by prosecutors and ordered her transfer to a residential facility. With this precautionary measure, the number of minors currently held in juvenile detention facilities (Ipm) on charges or convictions related to Islamic terrorism has risen to 20. Three are female, the average age is 16, 15 are second-generation Italians, and the other 5 are North African. The data comes from the prison administration. The young woman was caught at dawn at her family’s home in the Pavia area, an hour’s drive from Milan, where she lived with relatives.

She had been under surveillance for weeks, but investigators decided to speed up the raid, believing there was “a concrete possibility of imminent violent activation” on her part, given “the advanced radicalization process” she had reached.

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She had managed to join four chats, hiding her real identity behind a nickname consisting only of a string of numbers. In these virtual rooms, propaganda videos were posted, along with glorification of holy war and incitements to martyrdom.

In addition to volunteering to carry out a massacre, she also communicated privately with other members, all roughly her age, both Italian and foreign — all now being monitored by law enforcement. Despite the PDF file with instructions for building what is internationally known as a suicide belt, no explosive material was found on her, nor is there any indication she was in the process of obtaining any. The date and location of the attack she had promised to carry out also remain unknown.

Uncovering her intentions in advance required a joint operation involving multiple agencies — from the Cyber Security Operations Center in Umbria, to the police headquarters of Perugia and Milan, the Postal Police, and the counter-terrorism unit. A similar task force led, between late 2024 and early last year, to the dismantling of the cell “Da’wa Italia,” literally “Call to Arms, Italy.” Its members had been radicalized during the pandemic, were all under 30, and — overlooking the divisions between fundamentalist groups in the Arab world — celebrated both Al Qaeda and ISIS alike. Among them was a minor, radicalized by his older sister.

In that case too, the leader was a young woman: a 21-year-old of Pakistani origin living in Bologna. As for the young woman from Pavia, she is charged with “participation in an association with international terrorism aims.”

This is a crime carrying sentences ranging from 5 to 15 years, but proving it requires more than mere ideological adherence — it requires active participation, which is what prosecutors believe she was engaged in. That said, since she is a minor, procedure requires leaning toward reduced or alternative sentences, such as the facility where she is now being held.