Free Republic

ROME - Police raided homes across Italy before dawn Friday and arrested seven alleged members of the radical Red Brigades suspected of the 1999 killing of a Labor Ministry consultant. Authorities said the arrests struck at the heart of the left-wing terror organization, which sprang back into action a few years ago after more than a decade of silence. The suspects, officials said, might also have had a role in the slaying of another government adviser last year. Police arrested three men in Rome and one in Florence, prosecutors said. A woman was picked up in Pisa and another near...

One policeman was killed and another injured during a shoot-out on an Italian passenger train involving a suspected Red Brigades member, state television reported. The trouble started when an officer asked a passenger on the Florence-bound train for his identity documents. "The passenger put a gun to the head of one of the policemen and fired," a witness said in an interview with state radio. "Then he fired several more shots [at the other officer]," the traveller said. The injured man suffered a serious lung wound. A third policeman rushed to the aid of his colleagues, firing several shots, one...

A member of a splinter faction of Italy's Red Brigades, arrested last month after a shoot-out in a train, admitted yesterday killing two prominent government advisers involved in the overhaul of employment laws. In a note handwritten in block letters, Desdemona Lioce, 43, said: "I claim responsibility for organising the actions taken against Massimo D'Antona and Mario Biagi." The admission was in a letter delivered yesterday to two Roman prosecuting magistrates, Franco Ionta and Pietro Saviotti. D'Antona was shot dead in May 1999 and Biagi in March last year. They were experts on labour law drafted in by the Minister...