Two arrested over journalist's murder

• From:NewsCore
• April 17, 2011

In mourning: Palestinians light candles in front of a symbolic coffin during a protest against the killing of Italian activist Vittorio Arrigoni in Gaza City. AP

HAMAS arrested another two people over the murder of an Italian journalist, bringing the total number of suspects in custody over the crime to four.

The interior ministry "managed to arrest two suspects" in the murder on Friday of pro-Palestinian journalist Vittorio Arrigoni, in addition to two other suspects previously taken into custody, a Hamas statement said.

"The security forces continue to hunt other members of the group responsible for the murder," the statement said.

The kidnapped Italian journalist's body was found in Gaza after he was killed by a radical Islamist group, a Hamas security official said Friday.

The Salafist extremists, inspired by terror group al Qaeda, had posted a video of what they claimed was an Italian reporter on YouTube, tied up and blindfolded.

They had threatened to kill him within 30 hours if Hamas did not release a number of Palestinian prisoners.

Arrigoni was an activist with a pro-Palestinian group called the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), and was also working as a journalist and writer, according to foreign aid workers.But a spokesman for the Islamist movement Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, said, "The Italian was killed by suffocation and his body was found in a street of the city of Gaza."

Rome denounced the "barbaric murder," in a statement issued Friday by the Italian foreign ministry

.