Italy:For the second time in five months, the spectre of 1970s-style terrorism raised its head in the northern Italian city of Padua yesterday when two alleged members of the PCPM (Partito Comunista Politico Militare), a group linked to the Red Brigades, were arrested.
Andrea Tonello (52) and Giampietro Simonetto (19) were arrested in the early hours of yesterday on charges of "political subversion" and of preparing to commit terrorist offences.
Investigating magistrate Guido Salvini did not indicate the nature of the alleged terrorists' plans, but he did suggest that they were serious and well advanced.
"The PCPM had put together again its terrorist structure and had got to a fairly advanced point of planning and preparation and was ready to pass on to the realisation of its plans," he said.
In practice, it appears that the older man - Tonello, already arrested for terrorism related to offences in 1986 - was the organisational brains behind the Padua "cell", whereas Simonetto was called on to use his legally held gun licence to procure arms.
Yesterday's arrests follow on from last February, when 15 people were arrested in Padua on Red Brigades-related charges, and serve as a reminder that the brigades have not entirely disappeared.
Highly active in the 1970s, when the group's most infamous "military action" was the kidnapping and subsequent killing of former Christian Democrat prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978, the Red Brigades had disappeared from public life in the late 1980s and for most of the 1990s.
The killings of government advisers Massimo D'Antona in Rome in May 1999 and Marco Biagi in Bologna in March 2002 served as an unwelcome reminder that a new and very small brigade, linked by its extreme "military" stance to the old one, could still strike at the heart of Italian democracy.
Investigating magistrate Salvini appeared to indicate as much yesterday when saying that police inquiries had revealed organisational links, including use of the same weapons employed by a Milan-based section of the Red Brigades more than 20 years ago.
Furthermore, the fact that one of the two men arrested yesterday is only 19 years old would indicate the Red Brigades still have an active, if tiny, following in certain extreme left-wing circles.