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...

Milan, 13 Feb. (AKI) - Magistrates in Milan on Tuesday started questioning 15 alleged members of the leftist Red Brigades terror group a day after police arrested them on charges of planning attacks against the Milan home of conservative opposition leader and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, his Mediaset group, the Sky group, right-wing daily Libero, Italy's main oil company ENI and jurist Pietro Ichino, a government consultant on labour reform. Meanwhile, on Tuesday morning Italy's largest circulation daily Corriere della Sera received threats in a phone call placed by alleged members of the terror group in response to the arrests....

Italian investigators are focusing their attention on a shadowy group thought to be based in Bologna after a string of bomb attacks beginning in the Christmas period. A Red Brigades logo was found near a murder scene in 2002 They suspect that a number of letter bombs received by EU officials, including European Commission President Romano Prodi, are the work of Italian anarchists. An Italian-based group calling itself the Informal Anarchist Federation has claimed responsibility for the attacks. Investigators believe the group has fewer than 300 members in Italy. The previously unknown group shares the Italian initials - FAI -...

Italy goes after its lost terrorists 26.08.2004 By PETER POPHAM in Rome Incensed by the disappearance last weekend from Paris of convicted terrorist Cesari Battisti, Italy says it will press France and Nicaragua to return 12 other convicted left-wing terrorists who have evaded justice by living in exile. They include Alessio Casimirri, the only member of the Red Brigade gang that kidnapped and killed former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro still at liberty. He is living in Nicaragua. All the others are believed to be in France. France agreed in 2002 to return Italians who are wanted for serious crimes,...

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...

 March 21, 2002 Red Brigades Say They 'Executed' Italy Official By REUTERS Filed at 3:35 p.m. ETROME (Reuters) - An offshoot of Italy's Red Brigades urban guerrilla movement published a 26-page Internet message on Thursday saying it had ``executed'' a top government adviser and reviving fears of a new era in political killings.Marco Biagi, 52, was shot dead on Tuesday night in the northern city of Bologna with the same pistol that the Red Brigades for the Construction of the Fighting Communist Party had used to kill another government aide in 1999.Police pored over video material collected from security...

A SENIOR Italian government adviser on labour relations was murdered by gunmen apparently opposed to his proposals to make it easier to sack workers. Marco Biagi, 52, an affable professor responsible for drafting the government's package of labour market reforms, was shot dead by two attackers while cycling home on Tuesday night in Bologna, the nerve-centre of the Italian far Left. The murder is the most dramatic evidence so far of the political tension welling up in Italy since the Right-wing government of the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, took power last year, backed by the "post-fascist" National Alliance and the...