Terrorist threats and acts carried out by transnational criminal networks who use terror for their own economic interests or political goals should be defined as organized crime. The same knowledge and tools used with results in countering criminal organizations should be applied.
At the beginning of 2015, Charlie Hebdo Paris' attacks made clear that Europe risked increasing threats from jihadist cells and homegrown jihadists. Therefore, the powers of the National Antimafia Directorate, as information gathering, impetus and coordination Italian central authority, were extended to terrorism.
Nowadays, criminal networks operate, in small units, on different flexible levels responding to variables on the international scene according to historic circumstances, receiving help and various criminal services, through legal, irregular and illegal combined actions committed by different authors based in different countries, cooperating occasionally or structurally through time. Only at the end of this long complex process there might be a final outburst of extreme violence in a single European or non-European State.
On the national level, Italy rejected the option of establishing a central authority to directly carry out investigations and prosecutions in counterterrorism, option far from the horizontal judicial system tradition that safeguards the independence of the judiciary, the key factor for efficiency and results.
The logic and the rules of international judicial cooperation should be modified, substituting mutual legal assistance requests for an international coordination of investigations from the very beginning, for an immediate and spontaneous exchange of information, for a coordinated management of any transnational investigation. Experience shared by members of judiciaries constitute a wealth of essential know-how for practical and thoughtful reflection on this topic.