Italy goes after its lost terrorists

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, but none has been extradited.

Battisti's disappearance - yesterday the French daily Liberation said he had left the country - was greeted by Italy's right-wing press as proof that France is not taking Italy's concerns seriously.

On Tuesday, Italian Justice Minister Roberto Castelli returned to the offensive.

"The flight of Battisti," he said, "is the fault of the European left, which defends assassins and fugitives."

Italy's centre-left coalition, the Olive Tree, immediately fired off an angry letter to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, demanding an apology for Castelli's statement.

The row over Cesare Battisti, who fled to France in 1990 and was convicted in absentia of murdering four people during his years as an ultra-left terrorist, shows how far away European Union is from achieving the "single judicial space", in which extradition from one member country to another is automatic.

France's President Francois Mitterrand threw open the doors to left-wing Italian terrorists, veterans of Italy's so-called "anni di piombo" ("years of lead") of the 1970s and '80s, when communist and neo-fascist groups traded many bloody atrocities.

One of the reasons for what became known as the "Mitterrand doctrine" was that the left-wingers risked being tried under emergency laws which Paris did not endorse.

The Italians were allowed to stay in France on condition that they renounced violence.

Berlusconi's centre-right coalition has made the return of Battisti and others to face new trials a point of principle in its war with the left, and a question of national honour in Itay's relations with France.

James Walston, professor of political science at the American University in Rome, commented: "The row brings back a lot of nasty tastes from the years of lead ...

"It's an excuse for the centre-right to say, 'look at these lefties, they're still communists'. It's a way of smearing the left, saying that the left associates with terrorists."

And the Italian left's response suggests the Government is on to a winner. While the centre-left leapt to attack Castelli's imputation that it befriends "assassins", the unreformed left stuck to its guns.

In the independent communist daily Il Manifesto yesterday, Andrea Colombo wrote: "The Italian Government is pursuing the objective of locking up a gentleman who has broken every bridge with his past, and who for 10 years has not represented a danger for public order, either Italian or French."

But Walston said: "If someone has been convicted, they are criminals and they should pay some price. This shouldn't be an issue any more. This was 20 years ago, and there should be acceptance of what happened.

"Unfortunately in Italy there isn't even acceptance of what happened in the Second World War."

The whole debate has been given a twist of topicality by the decision last week of Cinzia Banelli, accused of being a member of a new Red Brigades offshoot (Red Brigades - Combative Communist Party), to give evidence against her comrades.

The new group, which has no membership overlap with the original Red Brigades, is blamed for the murders of two academics, Massimo D'Antona and Marco Biagi, who were helping the Government to draft a new labour law.

Yesterday Andrea Colombo described the latter-day Red Brigades as "the repetition in farce of the original tragedy".

- INDEPENDENT