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 judge has ordered 17 suspected members of Italy's Red Brigades militant group to stand trial next year, on charges including murder. Five suspects will be tried for the murder of a Labour ministry consultant shot dead in 1999. They include Nadia Lioce, already in jail for murdering a police officer. The ultra-left Red Brigades terrorised Italy during the 1970s and 80s, with a wave of attacks and bombings blamed for killing 415 people. Most of their leaders were eventually arrested and sentenced to long prison terms. Shoot-out But the group re-emerged with the murder of consultant Massimo d'Antona in...