Ex-guerrilla flees France as extradition looms

Ros Taylor

One of France’s ex-terrorists is missing. Cesare Battisti, the Italian ex-guerrilla
turned thriller writer and pin-up of the far left who was granted asylum by a
sympathetic François Mitterrand in 1985 after a court in Rome handed down a life
sentence in his absence, has apparently fled.

The precise nature of Battisti’s revolutionary activities has never been entirely
clear. Born in 1954, the biography on his website records that he joined an organisation
called Armed Proletarians for Communism in 1976 after various run-ins with the
police. In 1979, he fell foul of what he describes as a "vast anti-terrorist
operation" and was jailed.

Two years later, Battisti escaped - first to France and then to Mexico, where he worked as a journalist before returning to Paris. Mr Mitterrand allowed him to stay on condition that he renounced all terrorist activities and did not attempt to flee.

Several critically acclaimed thrillers followed, including the semi-autobiographical The Last Bullets. In 1993, an Italian court found Battisti guilty in his absence of the murders of a prison guard, a policeman, and a neo-fascist militant.

But it was not until February of this year that the French government - keen to avoid the charge that it was soft on terrorists - finally bowed to pressure from Rome and arrested him.

Much to the disgust of his supporters, a French court subsequently ruled that he could be extradited to Italy. His lawyers claim the only evidence against him was supplied by turncoats and that at least one of them was tortured during the trial.

Fred Vargas, another thriller writer, promptly rushed out a book protesting his innocence, La Vérité sur Cesare Battisti. The man himself insisted in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche earlier this month that he had never killed anyone. The French left, meanwhile, urged President Jacques Chirac not to betray a man to whom his predecessor had granted asylum.

Battisti’s lawyers accused the government of breaching the European convention of human rights in accepting the verdict of the Italian court.

It was to no avail. Faced with an intransigent government and the prospect of spending the rest of his life in jail without a retrial, Battisti failed to sign in at the local police station last Saturday for his weekly check.

"If he has fled, which I can only suppose he has, he is entitled to defend himself," Ms Vargas told Libération today. "I’ve seen the psychological damage that the media’s campaign against him has done."

"He realised that the separation of power no longer exists, that Chirac and Berlusconi had made up their minds to condemn him," she added. "He was becoming more and more fragile." She told France Inter radio she was afraid he would harm himself.

There was plenty of sympathy for the fugitive today among those who sympathised with his armed struggle against the Italian state. "He was trapped," a communist senator told Libération. "There was no possibility of a retrial in Italy."

"He chose life, and I’m happy for him," another ex-member of the Red Brigades, Oreste Scalzone, told the paper.

The Italian government was less sanguine at the news that France had allowed Battisti to get away. Roberto Castelli, a minister in the Italian government, praised the French courts for ordering his extradition this morning but attacked French "leftwing intellectuals" who, he said, had more sympathy for terrorists than their victims.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,1289836,00.html