Deadly shoot-out on Italian train

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.

A third policeman rushed to the aid of his colleagues, firing several shots, one of which injured the gun-wielding passenger.

The gunman was travelling with a female companion, whom police identified as Desdemona Lioce.

She is said to be a member of an offshoot of the Red Brigades Marxist guerrilla group who had been on the run for several years.

Italian anti-terrorism laws allow police to stop passers-by and travellers and demand to see identification.

Also : Policeman dies in terrorist shooting, 02/03/2003 - 14:45:33

A passenger on a train heading to Florence Sunday opened fire on police who had asked to see identity documents, killing one officer and wounding another, state television said.
Investigators suspected that the attacker’s companion aboard was a wanted Red Brigades terrorist, it reported.
Another passenger told state radio that he was travelling on the largely empty early morning train, which was making local stops between Rome and Florence, and turned to look when he heard loud voices coming from a passenger compartment. “The passenger put a gun to the head of one of the policemen and fired,” said the passenger.
He then fired several more shots at the other officer, who suffered a serious lung wound.
A third policeman rushed to the aid of his colleagues, firing several shots, including one which injured the passenger who had shot the policeman in the head. It was not clear why the passengers were asked to show identification.
In Italy, under anti-terrorism legislation enacted when the country was battling domestic terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, police can stop passers-by and travellers, including in cars, and demand to see identification.
The Italian news agency ANSA said anti-terrorism experts were questioning the gunman’s companion, an Italian woman, who was described as being calm after the attack, which happened when the train was near the Tuscan town of Arezzo.
RAI state TV said the woman was believed to be Desdemona Lioce, 43, suspected of belonging to a recently revived organisation of Red Brigades. The attacker was not immediately identified, but news reports said he appeared to be Italian.
Italy suffered from shootings by terrorists from the extreme left and bombings blamed on terrorists on the extreme right in the 1970s and 1980s, but domestic terrorism was considered largely vanquished with the arrest of scores of suspects.
In 1999, terrorism returned to Italy with the killing of a consultant working on labour reform which had been denounced by many leftists.
The fatal shooting of Massimo D’Antona on a Rome street was the first Red Brigades attack in 11 years. In March 2002, gunmen in Bologna gunned down another labour reform consultant, Marco Biagi, outside his apartment block.
None of the killers has been caught.

Italy nabs guerrilla suspect after train gunfight

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/latestnewsstory.cfm?storyID=3198713&thesection=news&thesubsection=world

03.03.2003 8.39 am

AREZZO, Italy - After a deadly gunfight aboard a moving train, Italian authorities arrested a suspected woman guerrilla they believe was involved in the assassination of a government official nearly four years ago.

Transport police captured Desdemona Lioce, a 44-year-old suspected member of the so-called New Red Brigades, on a Florence-bound train but only after a shootout in which one officer died and another was seriously injured.

Lioce was named as an accomplice in the investigation into the 1999 murder of Massimo D'Antona, an adviser to the labour ministry who was gunned down outside his Rome home.

On Sunday, three transport policemen aboard the train asked Lioce to show her identification. They were studying the documents as the train was nearing the Tuscan town of Arezzo when Lioce's male companion, Mario Galesi, whipped out a gun.

"The woman was also armed and she put a pistol to the head of one of the officers. She had a icy stare that I'll never forget," an off-duty traffic warden who was on the train told Ansa news agency.

In the shootout that followed one policeman was killed on the spot, another took a bullet in the liver and Galesi, 37, was also wounded. The traffic warden, off on a day trip to Florence with his wife, helped the third policeman restrain Lioce.

The New Red Brigades are the modern incarnation of the urban guerrilla group that terrorised Italy in the late 1970s and 1980s -- the so-called "years of lead" because of the bullets that littered pavements after the attacks.

The original Red Brigades hit the world's headlines in 1978 when they kidnapped and killed former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, leaving his body in the back of a car parked in central Rome.

Italy beefed up anti-terrorism legislation, giving police the right to stop passers-by and demand identification.

A decade of relative tranquillity ended with D'Antona's murder in May 1999 and in March 2002 the same pistol was used to kill Marco Biagi, a senior government economist.

The New Red Brigades claimed responsibility for the two assassinations, both carried out at moments of great tension in Italy -- first during the Kosovo crisis and then during massive union unrest over government labour reforms.

Now as the world anxiously waits to see whether there will be a US-led war in Iraq, authorities ask why Lioce and Galesi were on the train and armed.

"We think they were probably planning an attack," a source at the public prosecutor's office in Rome told Reuters.

Desdemona seems to have some sort of track record with the authorities. The older web articles that google returns are in Italian.

Translated by google from Italian.
I capi d'imputazione
http://qn.quotidiano.net/art/2000/05/16/926294

Nadia Desdemona Lioce. [May, 2000]

Never it has not been caught up from some provision, but it is from the ' 95 that the enquirers would want to speak with Nadia Desdemona Lioce, the woman whose name is between those contents in the guard decree. Before today the name of Nadia Desdemona Lioce, 41 years, pisana, had been connected to Luici Fuccini, 40 years, pisano, arrested to Rome in 1995 with to Fabio Matteini, 40 years, fiorentino: stopped for a normal control why surprises close to a small engine turned out stolen close to the mansion of the mail of the Cristoforo quarter Columbus, proclamarono then pertaining to the Communist Fighting Units and captive politicians.

According to the investigators the two, today both free ones, would have been in procinto committing a holdup, perhaps with the complicity of other persons. Nadia Lioce to the age cohabited to Pisa with Fuccini: for this the investigators would have intentional to speak them. But after the arrest of Fuccini one went away from Pisa. According to the last information he would have lived also in Germany. After the homicide Of Antona its name appears on the reports. An approach that door the family to diffuse, through a lawyer, a famous one in order to remember that the woman "is one free citizen, never subordinate to some penal procedure for crimes associate to you neither of other nature".

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