Posted on 02/13/2007 7:59:43 AM PST by Valin
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.
"I have to read a statement of the Red Brigades - nothing will remain unpunished and we have taken in our hands the flag which has fallen" with the arrests, a voice said.
"We have prevented dangerous people, who felt at war against the state, from carrying out violent attacks against human targets," Milan prosecutor Ilda Bocassini, who lead investigations into the group, told reporters after the arrests.
Security officials say the suspects had weapons and practised shooting in the countryside near the northern town of Rovigo.
Police believe ring members had been studying their targets for some time to prepare for the attacks and had been following potential victims including anti-terror magistrates. Indeed, phone taps revealed that members of the ring had entered by accident the office of chief anti-terror prosecutor Armando Spataro in Milan's tribunal - who was not in his room at the time - without being stopped.
Eight of the 15 alleged terrorists were members of Italy's leading labour union, left-wing CGIL, many of them in their 20s and 30s. The group's leader Alfredo Davanzo, who declared himself a 'political prisoner' after his arrest, is a 50-year-old convicted terrorist who lived in hiding after having returned to Italy from France.
Italy has a long history of politically motivated extremist groups. The most notorious was the Marxist-Leninist historic Red Brigades movement formed in the 1970s mainly by students who carried out an armed struggle against the capitalist state.
The Red Brigades created such fear during the 1970s and early 1980s that the period is known in Italy as the Years of Lead, referring to the vast number of bullets fired.
The current group is believed to be a splinter of the Red Brigades, whose criminal activities included the 1978 abduction and murder of Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro.
Members of the 'new Red Brigades' were found guilty of the murder of two leading jurists who served as government advisors on labour reform, Massimo D'Antona and Marco Biagi.
In 2005, a court in Bologna handed out five life sentences to as many people found guilty of murdering Biagi in 2002.
The terrorists have also been linked to the murder of D'Antona in 1999.
Both jurists were working on labour market changes and Biagi drafted a reform, parts of which were turned into a law by the previous Berlusconi government.
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