Rome ? Italian police arrested three Moroccans on Saturday – an imam and two aides – accusing them of belonging to a militant cell that allegedly used a mosque in central Italy as a terror training camp.

The cell held courses on hand-to-hand combat and used propaganda films and documents downloaded from the Internet to teach students how to prepare poisons and explosives, pilot a Boeing 747 and send encrypted messages, anti-terrorism police in Rome said in a statement.

The mosque on the outskirts of Perugia, the Umbrian capital, also offered weapons training, as well as instructions on how to ambush, how to reach combat zones safely and how to send encrypted messages, police said.

Officers seized barrels of chemical substances, including acids, nitrates and ferrocyanide, found in the mosque’s cellar, police said, speculating that the chemicals could have been used for experiments in the terror training courses.