Italian fugitive captured in Brazil
Fugitive Cesare Battisti, a former Italian revolutionary who reinvented himself as a writer in France while wanted in Italy for two 1970s murders, has been arrested near Brazil’s Copacabana beach.
Extradition proceedings were immediately set in motion after his arrest yesterday morning, said a spokesman for Brazilian federal police, Bruno Ramos.
Brazil’s Supreme Court was to analyse the request for extradition, most likely to Italy.
“Brazilian police had been following him for several months after receiving information from Interpol in Paris and Rome,” Ramos said.
Like numerous other leftists wanted for their roles in a tumultuous period of bombings and assassinations in Italy, Battisti, who escaped from an Italian prison in 1981, took refuge in France in the 1990s.
Proclaiming his innocence, he lived there for more than a decade, making a career writing police thrillers – until France changed its tacit policy, developed under Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, of allowing Italian militants to remain in the country if they renounced their militant ways.
Battisti fled France after Paris signed an extradition order in 2004 that would have sent him back to Italy. Ramos said it was likely Battisti had been living illegally in Brazil since then.
A young woman from a support committee assigned to bring money to Battisti proved to be his undoing.
Acting on a tip from Italian police, the French watched the woman for a month, tracking her to the Rio de Janeiro hotel where Battisti was arrested, French police officials said.
It was not immediately clear whether she was arrested.
In Rome, Italian Premier Romano Prodi called the operation “brilliant” and congratulated Italian, French and Brazilian law enforcement officials.
A former member of the Armed Proletarians for Communism, Battisti was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life in prison in Italy in 1990 for the murders of a prison guard and a butcher in the late 1970s.
Battisti reiterated his claim of innocence in a book published in France a year ago.
“I am guilty, as I have often said, of having participated in an armed group with a subversive aim and of having carried weapons. But I never shot anyone,” he wrote in “Ma Cavale” (“My Escape”).
Brazilian Rep. Fernando Gabeira said he would lobby against Battisti’s extradition.
“Battisti is a man dedicated to his intellectual work,” a statement on the congressman’s website said. “Battisti deserves our help.”
Gabeira himself spent time in prison, for the 1969 kidnapping of a US ambassador – a move intended to protest Brazil’s 1964-86 military dictatorship.
France’s tougher approach toward leftist revolutionaries also resulted in the 2003 extradition to Italy of Paolo Persichetti, a former member of a faction of the Red Brigades, to serve out a 22 year prison sentence.
Battisti is also accused of being an accomplice to the murders of a police officer and of jeweller Luigi Torregiani.
Torregiani, who was killed in a gun battle with his assailant, was in Milan on the same day Lino Sabbadin, the butcher, was killed.
Alberto Torregiani, the jeweller’s son, said Battisti needed to pay “until the end and stay in prison”, according to the ANSA agency.
“This would show that justice can be achieved even after 30 years,” said Torregiani, who was wounded and paralysed by one of the bullets in the attack.
Some in France believed that Italian militants would not get fair trials at home, where mass arrests and informants were used to combat extremists.
French artists and intellectuals, including novelist Fred Vargas and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, rallied around Battisti and his efforts to stay in France.
However, Mitterrand’s legacy left France vulnerable to criticism that it was not doing enough to combat terrorism.
