Italy claims new victory in Red Brigades probe

Italian police discovered a 100kg cache of explosives at a Red Brigades guerilla group hideout in a raid the interior minister described yesterday as a key advance in a probe into the slaying of two political advisers.

Police broke into an apartment late on Saturday near Rome city centre which they said had been used as a base by the shadowy, modern incarnation of the ultra-left Red Brigades group that terrorised Italy in the 1970s.

"The discovery of the latest Red Brigades hideout gives a decisive push to the investigations into the murders... and, more generally, reinforces the state's actions against domestic terrorism," minister Giuseppe Pisanu said in a statement.

Nine suspected members of the new Red Brigades were arrested during raids in October and Mr Pisanu said at the time Italy had uprooted the group.

They are accused of involvement in the murders of two senior Labour Ministry advisers, Massimo D'Antona and Marco Biagi.

Mr D'Antona was shot dead on his way to work in Rome in May 1999, while Mr Biagi was gunned down in front of his house in the northern city of Bologna in March 2002. The new Red Brigades claimed responsibility for both killings. At a news conference yesterday, police displayed explosives, pistols and hand grenades they seized in the hideout as well as false documents and the original statement claiming responsibility for the Biagi murder.

They also showed false police uniforms and weapons and two rubber masks representing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Fausto Bertinotti, the head of the Communist Refoundation party.

Police did not give any details of what the equipment was for and said there was no evidence any attacks had been planned.

No new arrests were made. Police said they were looking for a 35-year-old woman, named as Diana Blefari Melazzi, who went on the run in October, at the time of the nine arrests.

The killings of Mr D'Antona and Mr Biagi raised fears of a revival of the "years of lead" in the 1970s and early 1980s, when urban guerilla groups from the far left and right littered Italy's streets with bullets.

Police made their first major breakthrough in the two cases in March this year, when they nabbed two suspected Red Brigades members after a gunbattle in a moving train in which a policeman was shot dead.

Then came the October arrests, which Pisanu said had broken the back of the guerilla group and which quelled fears of a resurgence of the violent mayhem of the years of lead.

The original Red Brigades made world headlines in 1978 when they kidnapped former Prime Minister Aldo Moro and held him captive in a Rome apartment for weeks before killing him and dumping his body in the trunk of a car in the city centre.