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Italy downplays Red Brigades file find

Philip Willan
Thursday 21 October 2004 00:00 BST
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The Italian government reassured the nation yesterday that the notorious Red Brigades have been defeated despite the discovery of detailed files kept by the group on dozens of top figures including the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

The Italian government reassured the nation yesterday that the notorious Red Brigades have been defeated despite the discovery of detailed files kept by the group on dozens of top figures including the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

The revelation that the Brigades had computer records of addresses and daily routines of politicians, union leaders, economists and magistrates had sparked fears of a resurgence of domestic terrorism.

Giuseppe Pisanu, the interior minister, said yesterday he was confident that all the new generation of " brigatisti" who embarked on a campaign of homicidal violence five years ago had now been captured. He said Red Brigades members still at liberty adhered to a "second position" which rejects assassination as an instrument of political struggle. "Results of the investigations show that the Red Brigades have been defeated," he told the Rome daily La Repubblica.

The existence of the files was revealed less than 24 hours after a Rome judge ordered 17 alleged members of the organisation to stand trial for terrorism crimes early next year.

The Red Brigades were responsible for more than 400 deaths during the 1970s and early 1980s, reaching a peak of influence in 1978 when they kidnapped and murdered Aldo Moro, a former Christian Democrat prime minister, after holding him captive for 55 days. The organisation appeared to have been defeated in the 1990s but re-emerged from a decade of quiescence in 1999 when it shot dead a labour law consultant to the centre-left government. Three years later it was the turn of another labour law expert, Marco Biagi, this time an adviser to a centre-right administration.

Fears were raised that Italy faced a return to its notorious "years of lead". But a shootout on a train in March 2003 led to the death and capture of two of the organisation's top operatives and further alleged members of the group were identified through the painstaking monitoring of their telephone traffic.

The latest breakthroughs came thanks to Cinzia Banelli, a captured revolutionary who turned state's evidence after the birth in prison of a son. Her decision to hand over computer passwords has given police access to a large portion of the Red Brigades' electronic archive.

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