Berlusconi's military intelligence chief accused of spying on judges

Who is the most anomalous figure in Italian public life today? Step forward the balding, paunchy person of Niccolo Pollari.

Aged 64, he looks every inch an Italian Sir Humphrey, with his gold-rimmed glasses, dark three-piece suits and undertaker's demeanour. In 2001, the Prime Minister at the time, Silvio Berlusconi, made him head of Italy's secret military intelligence agency, Sismi. Earlier this year, Mr Berlusconi's successor, Romano Prodi, appointed him as senior counsellor in his office.

But, this week, allegations against Mr Pollari emerged from the office of the Superior Council of Magistrates, the governing body of the judiciary, which answers to the head of state. According to the council, while Mr Pollari was in charge of the agency, some two hundred judges and magistrates deemed politically unreliable were spied on by military intelligence.

They included senior prosecutors and judges involved in trials relating to Mr Berlusconi in Milan, and in the tracking down and prosecution of powerful Mafiosi in Sicily. Mr Pollari put judges in Milan, Turin, Rome and Palermo under close observation, the report said, "with the object of neutralising their initiatives and minimising the consequences of their aggressive activities".

The Italian judges who were spied upon - foreign judges working on EU business in Italy also came within the frame - were what Mr Berlusconi called the toghe rosse [red robes], many belonging to a left-wing association called Magistratura Democratica. The media billionaire said they were behind a legal campaign to force him from power.

Under Mr Pollari, Sismi's role of "protecting the integrity of the state meant defending a government from constitutional checks and balances," said La Repubblica. Sismi was working to "create an 'autonomous' power, private and extra-institutional," with a mantra of: "state equals government, and opposition is subversion".

Last month, Mr Pollari went on trial in Milan along with 26 CIA agents, charged with plotting the abduction in Milan of Abu Omar, an Egyptian cleric, legally resident in Italy.