The 9 former Italian terrorists for whom the French justice will have to examine the possibility of extradition will all return home this evening. For each of them, the judge has decided on various degrees of probation, ranging from the obligation to sign the obligation to be present at home at certain times. All this pending the start of the hearings for each of them before the Chambre de l ‘Instruction for the Italian extradition request.
Luigi Bergamin, one of the three former Red terrorists fleeing after the wave of arrests yesterday morning in France, presented himself at the courthouse in Paris together with his lawyer to appear. A few hours later, Raffaele Ventura, wanted in the ‘Red Shadows’ operation, also did so, released after a few hours still “under judicial control”.
Bergamin, a former militant of the PAC (Armed Proletarians for Communism), must serve a sentence of 16 years and 11 months in prison as the creator of the murder of Marshal Antonio Santoro, chief of the prison police officers killed in Udine on 6 June 1978 by Cesare Battisti.
On April 8, Bergamin’s prescription would have taken effect, but the terms were interrupted by the Milanese surveillance magistrate Gloria Gambitta at the request of prosecutor Adriana Blasco, who declared Bergamin a “habitual offender”. The judicial affair of Bergamin and the other Italians was followed directly in France by the Italian liaison magistrate in Paris, Roberta Collidà, in close cooperation with her French colleagues. Today the Collidà is in Rome for a meeting at the Ministry of Justice, destined to take stock of the “Ombre Rosse” operation and its developments in the coming days.
The lawyers Jean-Pierre Mignard and Pierre-Emmanuel Biard, after having announced the release, underline that Ventura, “72 years old, by profession a director, has never been a member of the Red Brigades but of the far-left movement Autonomia Operaia which has never foreseen armed struggle or attacks on people. He has always denied the facts attributed to him. Consequently, he refuses his extradition. ‘
In France – the main destination of the terrorists – after the surrender of Ventura, the former Brigadier Maurizio Di Marzio is still wanted, who is given to flee before yesterday’s raid.
It was Macron’s France that reached, 40 years after Francois Mitterrand’s agreement with Bettino Craxi, an agreement with Mario Draghi’s Italy and arranged extradition for 10 former Italian Red terrorists. The operation, carefully prepared for weeks by the French anti-terrorism directorate in cooperation with the liaison officers of the Italian police in Paris, led to 7 arrests yesterday, three had managed to escape, including Bergamin.
The process is announced to be long, any extradition will be possible “not before 2 or 3 years,” warned the Elysée. Ten days ago, Draghi’s phone call to Macron, in which Paris’s willingness to give the green light to the French judiciary to examine the Italian requests for extradition was definitively sanctioned.