Oct 24, Italy: Red Brigades Members Arrested in Italy

Rome: In a series of pre-dawn raids across the country, Italian police arrested six alleged Red Brigades members suspected of killing a Labor Ministry consultant in 1999 - the first attack by the left-wing guerrilla group in over a decade. Police officials in Rome confirmed the arrests but refused to provide details. They said police forces were still carrying out the investigation, with scores of homes searched in cities across the country.

Italian news reports said three men were arrested in Rome and one in Florence. A woman was picked up in Pisa and the sixth suspect, also a woman, in Sardinia.

The raids reportedly involved about 1,000 police forces. News reports said police seized telephone cards, cellular phones, CDs, floppy disks and documents.

The government adviser, Massimo D'Antona, was gunned down outside his house in Rome in May 1999. He was working on bitterly contested labor reforms.

The murder was claimed by an offshoot of the Red Brigades, the leftist group that carried out acts of revolutionary violence in the 1970s and '80s.

Three years later, the same group, which calls itself the Red Brigades-Combatant Communist Party, claimed responsibility for the slaying of another labor consultant working on the same reform, Marco Biagi.

The original Red Brigades became one of the most notorious terror groups in 1978 when they kidnapped former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, holding him for two months before killing him.

The group had largely faded away until the D'Antona killing.

Source: Associated Press