Enrique Garcia Medina/AFPBuenos Aires police have arrested a person needed in Italy for many years for a kidnapping by the far-left militant group the Purple Brigades.
Leonardo Bertulazzi, who has had refugee standing in Argentina for a few years, faces 27 years in jail in Italy after almost 44 years on the run.
Bertulazzi, 72, was sentenced in absentia in Italy within the Nineteen Seventies for the kidnapping of naval engineer Pietro Costa, who got here from a rich Genoa ship-owning household.
He reportedly entered the nation from Chile on a false passport in 2002 and was first arrested by Buenos Aires police, however was launched months later and his extradition was blocked.
Gianni Giansanti/Gamma RaffoTwo years later, Leonardo Bertulazzi was granted refugee standing, however this standing was revoked when Argentina’s right-wing president, Javier Milley, got here to energy.
“Berturazzi is chargeable for crimes that undermine democratic values and the lives of many victims,” the Buenos Aires authorities stated in an announcement.
The Purple Brigades have been a Marxist guerrilla group that kidnapped and killed a number of state officers within the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties, together with former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. That interval of political violence turned generally known as the “Yr of the Chief” as a result of a spate of legal acts by each the far left and the far proper.
Bertulazzi was a part of the Genoese detachment of the Purple Brigades, who kidnapped Pietro Costa from the road and held him for 81 days earlier than receiving an enormous ransom.
The cash the group acquired from the kidnapping was then used to purchase an house in Rome, which was used within the Purple Brigades’ most infamous crime – the kidnapping and homicide of Aldo Moro in 1978.
Moreau was kidnapped when his automotive was ambushed on the best way to the opening of Congress. He was saved in an house for 54 days earlier than being shot useless and his physique dumped within the trunk of a Renault automotive in central Rome.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgio Meloni praised authorities in Buenos Aires for arresting Bertulazzi, including that his detention was made doable by “shut and productive cooperation” between authorities in each international locations, in addition to Interpol.
Bertulazzi’s attorneys have appealed to Argentina’s Nationwide Refugee Council (Conare) to dam his extradition.
Italy’s makes an attempt to extradite different former Purple Brigades members from France have failed in courtroom.
