Recaptured Italian ex-militant Battisti admits 1970s murders

ROME, Italy – Former communist militant Cesare Battisti has admitted 4 murders carried out in the 1970s, weeks after he was jailed in Italy for the killings that were part of a failed bid to spark a far-left revolution.

Battisti, 64, admitted all the charges brought against him “in 4 murder cases” during Italy’s so-called “Years of Lead,” Milan prosecutor Alberto Nobili was quoted as saying by Italian media on Monday, March 25.

He also reportedly admitted that armed revolution was wrong, Nobili said.

Nobili, who questioned Battisti at a high-security prison in Sardinia for 9 hours over the weekend, said it had “felt like I was watching the liberation of someone who was initially embarrassed, troubled.”

“I realize the bad I have done and apologize to the families,” Nobili quoted Battisti as saying.

Jailed in 1979 for belonging to an armed revolutionary group outlawed in Italy, Battisti escaped from prison two years later and spent nearly 4 decades on the run.

An international police operation eventually tracked him down and arrested him in Bolivia in January, before he was extradited to Italy.

Battisti was sentenced to life for having killed a policeman and a prison guard, for taking part in the murder of a butcher and for helping plan the slaying of a jeweler who died in a shootout that left his teenaged son in a wheelchair.

Apologies ‘out of place’

The murdered policeman’s brother Maurizio Campagna said “apologies now seem out of place.”

“I think his lawyer is advising him so he can have his sentence lowered,” Campagna told Italy’s Sky TG24 television.

Battisti is serving his sentence in a Sardinian prison housing more than 250 convicts, many of them living under the tough “41-bis” prison regime usually applied to Mafia members.

Battisti admitted the killings “little by little…not as a flood,” Nobili said.

“The armed struggle prevented the development of a cultural, social and political revolution which, from the events of ’68, would have been absolutely positive,” Nobili quoted Battisti as saying.

After his jailbreak, Battisti had reinvented himself as an author, writing a string of noir novels.

In 2004, he skipped bail in France where, like many other far-left Italian militants, he had taken refuge. He then went to live clandestinely in Brazil until he was arrested in 2007 in Rio de Janeiro.

After years in custody, then-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva issued a decree – later upheld by Brazil’s Supreme Court – in 2010 refusing Battisti’s extradition to Italy, and he was freed, angering Rome.

But earlier this year, Battisti was seized without a struggle in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in an operation carried out by a joint team of Italian and Bolivian officers.

Years of Lead

Until now, he had admitted to being part of the Armed Proletarians for Communism, a radical group that staged a string of robberies and attacks, but always rejected responsibility for any deaths, painting himself as a political refugee.

Italy’s Years of Lead was a decade of violent turmoil which began in the late 1960s and saw dozens of deadly attacks by hardline left-wing and right-wing groups.

During his election campaign, Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro vowed that if elected he would “immediately” send Battisti back to Italy.

Battisti had filed for asylum without receiving any response from authorities.

He had been hoping to find favor with Bolivia’s left-wing President Evo Morales after saying in his asylum request he had been forced to quit Brazil due to “the ominous coincidence” that Italy and Brazil were both now run by “far-right” governments.

Battisti, who has a five-year-old Brazilian son, in 2017 told AFP he would face “torture” and death if he were ever to be sent back to Italy.

Italian authorities are still hunting 30 “terrorists” on the run abroad, 27 from the left and 3 from the right.

Fourteen of those being sought are believed to be in France. – Rappler.com