Red Brigade suspects 'carried gun, spy camera and maps'

The suspected terrorists captured on a train in Italy on Sunday were carrying a gun, a miniature video camera hidden in a cigarette pack, a road map of central Italy, a palm-top computer and lists of names and addresses.

But despite poring over these items for hours yesterday, investigators in Florence admitted they had no clear picture of what action, if any, they had been planning.

One policeman died and another was badly hurt when Nadia Desdemona Lioce, on the run since 1995, answered a routine request for identity papers on the stopping train from Rome to Florence by opening fire. Her companion, Mario Galesi, aged 37, was wounded, and later died in hospital.

Yesterday Lioce confirmed her identity but refused to say any more. Police fear Lioce and Galesi were planning an attack that could yet be carried out by their comrades.

Yesterday a flyer with the Red Brigades' trademark five-pointed star was found at a train station near Parma, claiming responsibility for the shooting and commemorating Galesi, Rai television said. The flyer also announced a bomb threat to a train tunnel near the northern city.

The shooting has fanned fears in Italy that the Red Brigades' leftist terror group, which terrorised the country in the 1970s and 1980s, had added new recruits and was plotting to strike again.

An offshoot of the group claimed responsibility for the 1999 killing in Rome of Massimo D'Antona, an adviser to the Labour Ministry. Another consultant with the ministry, Mario Biagi, was gunned down last year. Police haven't caught the killers.

The Red Brigades, an ultra-left revolutionary group formed in 1973, killed and bombed across Italy until the early 1980s. Today 128 militants are in jail. The Red Brigades have never fully gone away. There have been several bomb attacks in the past few years blamed on "groupuscules" such as the Revolutionary Proletarian Initiative Nuclei and the Anti-Imperial Territorial Nuclei.