Free Republic

Universities can’t withstand mobs, as countless assaults have proven. I’ve lived through two: at Washington University in St. Louis, in 1968, and then about a decade later at the University of Rome. In the summer of ’68 I saw a good deal of the French “Revolution,” which took over most of Paris for a week or so. Its headquarters were at the Sorbonne. It’s in the nature of campus revolts that the leaders aren’t going to be satisfied with limited reforms to the school; they are inspired by inflated rhetoric, and they see themselves at the center of a great...

SNIPPET: "(ANSA) - Genoa, June 11 - Six Italians were arrested Thursday on suspicion of plotting to attack Group of Eight summit facilities. The Rome-based group was trying to revive the Red Brigades terrorist organisation that plagued Italy in the 1970s and '80s, officials said." SNIPPET: "The six, including two men from Genoa, one from Milan, a Sardinian pro-independence militant and an old-guard Red Brigades terrorist, have been taken into custody on terrorism charges. Five have been taken to prison and one, reportedly found with a bomb, was placed under house arrest because of his age. The arrests were the...

ROME (AP) — Italian police arrested six people Thursday in raids on a group of suspected radical leftists who were allegedly planning a terror attack, authorities said.

A former Italian president says his country had allowed Palestinian terror groups to roam free in exchange for not attacking Italian targets. Francesco Cossiga's admission confirmed claims of such a deal revealed last week in an interview in the Corriere della Sera newspaper with Bassam Abu Sharif, the former chief of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In a letter published Aug. 15 in Corriere della Sera, Cossiga described a "secret 'non-belligerence pact' between the Italian state and Palestinian resistance organizations, including terrorist groups" such as the PFLP. The deal, he said, had been devised by Prime Minister...

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....

Before there was Iraq, there was Lebanon.  In 1982, following Operation Peace for Galilee, JINSA reported on the international terrorist haven that had arisen in Fatahland – the southern part of Lebanon controlled by Yasser Arafat.  Aside from the expected mélange of Middle Easterners, there were Japanese Red Army, German and Italian Red Brigades, Nicaraguan Sandinistas, Salvadorans, Colombians and Peruvians.  There were Iranian Shi’ites, East Germans and Bulgarians.  Before there was Iraq, there was Lebanon, again.  Religious Iran and secular, Ba’athist Syria made a deal to use Syrian-controlled Lebanon as a base for Hizballah to attack Israel.  Today, Israel...

On the surface there would seem to be little to unite the Aryan racialists of the neo-Nazi movement with the terrorists of radical Islam. To the neo-Nazis, Muslims are almost all members of ``inferior`` races; and to the Islamic terrorists, the neo-Nazis are almost without exception either atheists or members of fringe quasi-Christian sects. But the reality is that there has been close cooperation between Muslim extremists and Fascists ever since the founding of the Nazi movement in the 1920`s. For all of their differences, Muslim extremists and Nazis have always been united by a common group of beliefs and...

ROME (AP) - A former member of Italy's feared Red Brigades terrorist group was convicted Tuesday in the death of a government labor adviser and sentenced to 16 years in prison - a harsher sentence than prosecutors had sought. The judge who convicted Cinzia Banelli handed down a sentence nearly three years longer than asked for by prosecutors, who had argued that Banelli had provided information to investigators about the 2002 killing and announced she was breaking from the extreme leftist group, the Apcom news agency said. Banelli was convicted Tuesday in the death of Marco Biagi in Bologna. Earlier...

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...

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,...

ROME (Reuters) - Two small homemade bombs have been found outside a McDonald's in Rome's outskirts with a leaflet printed with the five-pointed star of the Red Brigades guerrilla group, police say. Police defused both devices, which they said would have caused little damage, similar to a Molotov cocktail. Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu warned that although the devices were not powerful, the timing could be significant. Thursday was the fifth anniversary of the murder of Massimo D'Antona, an advisor to the government on controversial labour reforms, by the Red Brigades. Pisanu said he believed the same ultra-left movement could be...

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 -...

ROME -- Italian police have arrested two suspected members of the Red Brigades terror group, including one believed to have been involved in the organization's most notorious act, the 1978 kidnapping and killing of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Rome police on Wednesday confirmed the arrests of Rita Algranati e Maurizio Falessi and said the two were in custody in the Italian capital. No other details were released. Italian news reports said the two were arrested at Cairo airport in a joint operation by Italian and Egyptian police. The two, who had been fugitive for years, were carrying fake IDs,...

Italian police have raided an alleged hideout of the Red Brigades, the country's most notorious left-wing militant group. Police evacuated the entire apartment block in Rome for fear of an explosion. They found explosives and arms as well as police uniforms and documents claiming responsibility for the killing of a labour consultant last year. The raid follows the arrests of nine suspected members of the Red Brigades in October. The haul found in a basement in an eastern suburb of Rome included 100 kilos (220 pounds) of explosives, detonators and guns. Also seized were fake identity cards, police uniforms and,...

Police seize 'Red Brigades' cache By Frances Kennedy BBC correspondent in Rome Italian police have raided an alleged hideout of the Red Brigades, the country's most notorious left-wing militant group. Police evacuated the entire apartment block in Rome for fear of an explosion. They found explosives and arms as well as police uniforms and documents claiming responsibility for the killing of a labour consultant last year. The raid follows the arrests of nine suspected members of the Red Brigades in October. The haul found in a basement in an eastern suburb of Rome included 100 kilos (220 pounds) of explosives,...

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 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...

MILAN (Reuters) - A crude bomb has been found outside the Milan headquarters of carmaker Fiat and another has been discovered outside a labour union building near the city, police say. The devices, neither of which exploded, were found amid renewed concern about terrorism in Italy, where an economist working on controversial labour reforms was shot dead in March. An employee of a Fiat dealership found the device at the company's headquarters in a Milan suburb, said Marco Rizzo, a colonel with Italy's carabinieri police force. Rozzo told Reuters a timer appeared to have been set for later on Monday....

 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...