Italian police arrest three Red Brigade suspects

Italian police arrested three men suspected of subversive activity linked to the Red Brigades terrorist group in a pre-dawn swoop today.

The suspects were rounded up in the northern city of Pisa, accused of subversive association and belonging to an armed gang, said Lamberto Giannini of Rome’s anti-terrorist police squad, which helped co-ordinate the operation.

Giannini said two of the suspects – Luigi Fuccini and Adriano Ascoli – are believed to belong to the Red Brigades-Combatant Communist Party, an offshoot of the radical leftist Red Brigades that terrorised Italy in the 1970s and 1980s.

The group claimed responsibility for the killings of two Italian government labour consultants in 1999 and 2002, but the arrested men were not suspected in those killings, Giannini said.

A third man, Giuliano Pinori, is accused of belonging to the Combatant Communist Party before it merged with the resurgent Red Brigades, Giannini said. He said Pinori would be granted house arrest following questioning at Pisa police headquarters, while Fuccini and Ascoli would be detained in prison.

Giannini said the three suspects were part of a group linked to Cinzia Banelli, convicted earlier this year for the murder of the two labour consultants. Investigators say Banelli’s branch of the new Red Brigades is active in Pisa and the surrounding region of Tuscany.

He said police had been helped by Banelli, who began collaborating with authorities last year.

Giannini also said Fuccini had been in a relationship with Nadia Desdemona Lioce, one of five suspected Red Brigades members sentenced last week to life in prison for the slaying of labour consultant Marco Biagi in 2002.

Both Biagi and Massimo D’Antona, the consultant killed in 1999, were gunned down while working on reforms of Italy’s labour laws that were bitterly contested by Italian labour unions.