A 22-year-old Italian linked to white supremacist groups was arrested Friday on terrorism charges, Italian police said.

The man is accused of terrorist association and incitement to commit racist and anti-Semitic attacks, also through the spread of propaganda.

He was apprehended in the northwestern port city of Savona, a statement said.

Police also searched the homes of 12 suspected associates in other cities, including Turin in the north and Sicily's capital Palermo.

Italy's fringe, sometimes violent, far-right groups have roots in the country's Fascist dictatorship from 1922 to 1943 under Benito Mussolini.

In 2018, a neo-Nazi sympathiser fired on a dozen African migrants in the central town of Macerata, injuring six.

The attack was an apparent response to the killing of a young Italian woman blamed on a Nigerian drug dealer.

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