ITALY: The likelihood that latter-day Red Brigade activists were reponsbile for the murder in Bologna on Tuesday of government adviser Marco Biagi hardened yesterday. A 26-page document claiming responsibility for the killing was placed on the world-wide web by a group calling itself "The Red Brigades for the Construction of a Combatant Communist Party (BR-PCC)".
Posted on the website "Caserta24ore", which calls itself "an independent territorial communications agency" and claims to have received the document via e-mail, the Red Brigade statement begins: "On March 19th in Bologna, an armed unit of our organisation killed Marco Biagi, adviser to Labour Minister (Roberto) Maroni, ideologue and promoter of legislative proposals aimed at reshaping the exploitation of salaried workers."
The document goes on to attack the current governing "political coalitions" in Italy as serving only to protect the interests of "the imperialist bourgeoisie". It also attacks Mr Biagi for his EU work, both as an adviser to Commission President Romano Prodi and as a member of various committees.
The Red Brigade communiqué goes on to describe the September 11th attacks on the US as a "concrete act of opposition to imperialist strategy. The attacks show that it is possible to carry out a highly destructive attack in the heart of enemy territory without using sophisticated weapons."
It had always seemed likely that Mr Biagi (52) was assassinated because of his role in drafting government proposals aimed at introducing greater flexibility into the labour market, proposals which have prompted the trade unions to call a general strike.
On Wednesday, in phone calls to three different newspapers, an anonymous caller had claimed the Red Brigades were responsible for the Biagi killing. After an initial assessment, Italian anti-terrorist experts decided yesterday the communiqué was credible.
The similarity between this killing and that of Massimo D'Antona, another adviser to the Ministry of Labour gunned down in May 1999 in an assassination "claimed" by the BR-PCC, had already pointed the finger at the tiny latter-day Red Brigade movement. Links between the two killings appear to have hardened after ballistics experts on Wednesday suggested that the same gun, a calibre 9 x 17 pistol, was used in both assassinations.
The Biagi killing has shocked Italians, all too painfully mindful of the damage inflicted by left-wing and right-wing terrorism in the 1970s and early '80s, violence that made international headlines with the 1978 kidnapping and subsequent murder of Christian Democrat leader, Aldo Moro.
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