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| Europe |
| Italy Probes Terror Targets in Shootout |
| 2003-03-03 |
| Italian anti-terrorism experts scrambled Monday to determine the possible target of two suspected Red Brigades fugitives involved in a deadly shootout with police, amid fears the far-left group was preparing to strike again. The Red Brigades, which terrorized Italy in the '70s and '80 with attacks on politicians, businessmen and military officials, resumed killings a few years ago. On Sunday, after a gunfire exchange on a train about 50 miles south of Florence, police arrested Red Brigades member Nadia Desdemona Lioce, 43. She is wanted for the 1999 slaying in Rome of labor ministry adviser Massimo D'Antona, the first suspected Red Brigades attack in 11 years. Her companion, Mario Galesi, 37, died after surgery for his wounds. A policeman also was killed in the shootout, and another wounded. Investigators were concentrating on the contents of a bag the couple carried on the train, which included a tiny video camera tucked into a cigarette pack; floppy disks; a road map of central Italy; notebook pages with names and phone numbers; and a palm-held computer. Ooh, sounds like a intel goldmine. Italian news reports also said the bag contained articles from a financial newspaper about the labor reform guidelines drawn up by Mario Biagi, a government consultant gunned down in Bologna last year. Clippings about one of their targets, most likely. Florence Prosecutor Francesco Fleury, who is leading the investigation, said the pair had one gun, making it unlikely they were about to stage an attack. But, he said, they could have been preparing a terrorist strike. "The alarm remains high because they surely weren't isolated. It's not just those two terrorists," and it is possible they planned to meet with accomplices, said in a television interview. As a precaution, police guarded the home of an undersecretary in the labor ministry, Grazia Sestini, from Premier Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party. She lives in Arezzo, near where the shootout happened. Enzo Bianco, the head of the Italian Parliament's oversight committee on secret services, expressed concern that the Red Brigades and an associated terrorist group, the Fighting Communist Party, might target military figures in view of a possible war in Iraq, a prospect widely opposed by the Italian public. Investigators also considered the possibility the couple was planning a robbery to help bankroll their group. Terrorists / normal thugs = same thing Galesi was arrested in 1997 for robbing a Rome post office. He disappeared a year later while on a leave from prison. The shootout Sunday began after two policemen on the train asked the couple for identity documents, permitted under laws dating from terror crimes of the '70s and '80s. "Papers, please!" The Red Brigades' most notorious strike was the 1978 kidnapping and slaying of former Christian Democrat Premier Aldo Moro, and the kidnapping of U.S. Brig. Gen. James Dozier, who was freed in a police raid. |
| Posted by:Steve |