Ex-terrorist writer faces extradition from France

Jon Henley in Paris

A reformed Italian terrorist turned successful crime writer has been arrested and faces extradition from France, despite a longstanding promise that Paris would always provide a safe haven for one-time Red Brigades militants.

The arrest last week of Cesare Battisti, who has lived peaceably and openly in the French capital since 1990, has prompted a storm of protest.

"France offered judicial protection to these men and women," a Socialist party spokesman, Julien Dray, said yesterday. "Not to respect that promise would be unworthy of France’s traditions and an insult to our history."

Opponents say the government has broken a 1985 pledge by the late Socialist president, François Mitterrand, that members of the far-left terror cells, whose bombings and assassinations rocked Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, would be left in peace in France provided they renounced their past, did not go into hiding and kept out of politics.

Some 15 to 20 former extremists took up the offer, which followed widespread disquiet in France about the justice being dispensed at the time by Italian courts. Decisions were often based exclusively on the evidence of informers who had been guaranteed immunity from prosecution and full state protection.

"This all happened 30 years ago," Mariette Arnaud, Mr Battisti’s partner, said yesterday. "He was 17 when he got involved. What he was is part of the past now. If we live in a state governed by law and justice, we can’t send him back to Italy now."

Mr Battisti, 49, who has two children, aged 18 and nine, was arrested last Tuesday by French anti-terrorist police.

He was arrested in Italy in 1978, but escaped in 1980 and fled to Mexico. An Italian court sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment for four murders, all of which he denies, and 60 robberies.

He was arrested soon after his arrival in France in 1990, but a Paris court refused to extradite him, partly on the grounds that two of the murders took place on the same day and at the same time in Venice and Milan.

His lawyer, Irene Terrel, said: "An appeal court rejected extradition in 1991, which means France’s judicial protection is absolute and must be observed by the government."

Soon after the 2002 election, the justice minister, Dominique Perben, promised "a new approach" to the former Red Brigades, hinting that extraditions were possible.