Camera bike takes Italy back to future with arrest of terror cell
It began with the chance discovery in a Milan basement of a very unusual bicycle. Chief Superintendent Giuseppina Suma described how, following a tip off, police had examined the bike and found "a minute camera in the front light and a radio transmitter under the saddle".
It was the start of a three-year investigation that led this week to more than 80 raids in four Italian cities and the arrest of 15 people for alleged offences that seemed like echoes of an anguished past.
Italians opening their newspapers yesterday could be forgiven for thinking they had fallen into a time warp and spiralled back to the days of flared trousers, Zapata moustaches, Bee Gee hits - and murderous far-left terrorism.
One of those arrested declared himself a "political prisoner". The media reported on clandestine newsletters solemnly assessing the "current political condition of the masses". And Italy's interior minister, Giulano Amato, said the combined operation, involving police and officers of the civil intelligence service, SISDE, showed that the last embers of the Red Brigades, founded 37 years ago, had yet to be stamped out.
Back in 1984 the Red Brigades underwent what at the time was thought to be a terminal split, between a "militarist" wing and the supporters of the Second Position. But, while other similar movements elsewhere in the world sank into irrelevance, the militarist faction gave birth to cells that in 1999 and 2002 killed two government advisers. Both men were at the time drafting reforms of Italy's employment law, which their killers believed would lead to greater insecurity for workers.
Investigators believed those seized in the raids were adherents of the Second Position. Their organisation is thought to have called itself the Politico-Military Communist party (PCPM).
The 15 people now face charges of subversion and belonging to an armed gang. The prosecutor in charge of the inquiry, Ilda Boccassini, said the PCPM "regarded itself as being at war with the state".
Investigators said they had evidence that the group members had trained at night with Kalashnikovs and Uzi machine guns on farmland in the Po Valley. So far the group had carried out only one attack, on the vacated premises of a far-right wing group; but they planned to launch their next operation, at a conservative Milan newspaper before Easter.
Top of the alleged hit list was Pietro Ichino, an expert on employment law who also writes editorials for the Corriere della Sera. PCPM militants had shadowed him and been heard discussing whether he had a police escort, investigators said. Among the group's other targets were a villa owned by Silvio Berlusconi in Milan, the offices of Mr Berlusconi's Mediaset Group, plus those of Sky Television and of the oil giant ENI. Police said they had listened in as PCPM members discussed fire bombings, car bombings, kidnappings and knee cappings.
In a transcript released to the press, two of those arrested talked of bombing a business quarter where, said one, the only risk was to "a few security guards".
Embarrassingly for the government, several of the detainees belong to the trade union federation that is linked to the biggest party in Romano Prodi's centre-left coalition.
But what has most disquieted investigators is the span of the PCPM. It turns out to be neither a redoubt of ageing diehards nor a band of young hotheads, but an organisation comprising both experienced urban guerrillas and recent recruits.
Its alleged ideological guide, 50-year-old Alfredo Davanzo, who was seized at an unheated flat in the north-eastern mountains, has a long record of involvement in far-left terrorism and was once sentenced to 10 years in jail. He had smuggled himself back into Italy under an assumed name. The group's youngest alleged member was 21. Mr Amato warned that the organisation "broken up is not all there is".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/feb/14/italy.johnhooper
Secret Plans and Weapons Seized as Fifteen Red Brigade Terrorists Are Arrested
Police swoop across northern Italy. Two CGIL trade union delegates among those arrested. Ringleader Alfredo Davanzo was living in unheated mountain hideout.
MILAN – Police arrested fifteen Italian nationals on charges of terrorism yesterday in dawn raids carried out in the Lombardy, Piedmont and Triveneto regions. Those arrested are accused of organising a “terrorist association constituting an armed group”. Calling itself the Political-Military Communist Party (PCPM), the group adhered to the “second position”, the so-called “movimentista” faction, of the Red Brigades (BR). The group’s members were split into three cells in Milan, Padua and Turin. Among items seized by police were the weapons they used for shooting practice in the countryside near Rovigo and Milan. Two of those arrested are CGIL trade unionists, one of whom is believed to be the leader of the Turin cell. Strategic meetings were held every month in Chinese restaurants, as these were thought to be “unbuggable”, under the leadership of an old-style leftwing terrorist, Alfredo Davanzo. On the run since the 1980s, Davanzo returned to Italy in November 2006, having served his sentence, but he did so illegally, using a false document provided by accomplices. Davanzo’s mountain hideout at Raveo in the province of Treviso had no heating but it did have a computer. He is the only one of the fifteen arrested who claimed to be a political prisoner.
In the warrant, the magistrate Guido Salvini calls the fifteen the “essential core” of an “armed band to all effects”. Those arrested as founders of the band were the head of the Milan cell, Claudio Latino, 49, a former member of the Autonomia group in the Veneto, his pupil and successor at Padua, Davide Bortolato, 37, and a CGIL delegate from Turin with no criminal record, Vincenzo Sisi, 54. One prominent name on the list is Bruno Ghirardi, previously sentenced to twenty-two years imprisonment as a COLP terrorist. Released in 2001, he reappeared in 2006 discussing robberies, woundings, car bombs against the ENI energy group and attacks on Professor Pietro Ichino and the home of Silvio Berlusconi. Praising the police for “saving human lives”, the public prosecutor Ilda Boccassini explained the crucial role played by electronic eavesdropping in the restaurants where the four leaders held their strategic unions: “Their own words accuse them”. The crimes already committed are all preparatory, including the theft of cars and licence plates, and a raid on an ATM at Albignasego in the province of Padua on the night of 30 December that the police managed to avert by setting off the alarm “accidentally”. “They were planning fund-raising robberies, kidnappings and actions against human targets”, said Ms Boccassini. Three cells were active and they were engaged in armed struggle until a few hours ago”.
The DIGOS special branch filmed “a night exercise with at least one Uzi machine gun and one Kalashnikov” in the Beverare district of San Martino di Varezze in the province of Rovigo. “They fired during the night”, said Ms Boccassini, “and picked up the shell cases the following day”. The man who sold them the weapons was Sicilian-born Salvatore Scivoli, 55, “arrested at a very young age on organised crime charges and politicised in prison, to the point of signing the appeals for Curcio and Franceschini”. Police spokeswoman Giuseppina Suma pointed out that the investigation was sparked off by the chance discovery (a phone call by a tenant) in a cellar in Via Pepe in Milan of an odd “bicycle with a miniature camera in the light and a radio transmitter under the seat”. Months went by before surveillance led police to one of the building’s residents, Massimiliano Gaeta, who turned out to be the group’s technical expert. In May, the secret services extended their investigations to Turin and Padua. Davanzo was also editing the underground magazine, Aurora, and organising IT courses in Switzerland for communications security, held by the extremist Andrea Stauffacher, who was searched yesterday by the Bern public prosecutor’s office. There were also disturbing connections with long-established BR members. Ghirardi was a friend of Marcello Ghiringhelli, currently serving a life sentence and whose permission to work outside the prison was withdrawn yesterday.
Paolo Biondani, Cristina Marrone
http://www.corriere.it/english/articoli/2007/02_Febbraio/13/br.shtml