Terror group re-emerges from shadows

Graffiti at the scene of Biagi's murder simply states: "Target eliminated"

ROME, Italy -- Although blamed for a sporadic 30-year campaign of terror in Italy, little is known about the Red Brigades or its members.

Until three years ago it was thought that the group was defunct following a major crackdown by the authorities after a spate of murders in the 1970s and early 80s, including the notorious murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978.

But the murder in 1999 of senior government adviser Massimo D'Antona followed by the killing on Tuesday of labour adviser Marco Biagi has not only raised the Red Brigades' profile, but also resurrected the fear it once instilled.

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Biagi, 52, whose killing was claimed in a call to a local newspaper, was the fourth labour consultant to be murdered by the group since 1985. Another two were also injured in 1983 and 1986.

Chillingly, it has emerged that he was shot dead with the same 9 mm pistol that the terror group used to kill D'Antona.

In another link to a previous crime, a five-pointed star -- the logo chosen by Moro's killers -- was scratched on the door of Biagi's home in Bologna.

More graffiti on a nearby wall said simply "target eliminated."

Both D'Antona and Biagi advocated measures to loosen up Italy's labour market, one of the most rigid in Europe, by making it easier to fire workers.

A group claiming to be an offshoot of the Red Brigades -- Red Brigades for Building of the Fighting Communist Party -- posted a 26-page document on the Internet explaining why it "executed" Biagi.

"An armed nucleus of our organisation executed Marco Biagi," the document says.

Marco Biagi was gunned down outside his home

It says that Biagi was targeted because his work as a consultant to the labour minister made him part of a government which "represents the interests of bourgeois imperialism."

In its diatribe against modern capitalism, the group accused Biagi of "exploiting" workers with the labour reforms he had co-authored.

The message described Biagi's reforms as a "regulation of the exploitation of salaried workers."

The Red Brigades, a left-wing terrorist group, carried out a wave of bloody attacks in the 1970s.

Its reign of terror was known as the "years of lead" because of the bullets that often littered Italian streets after the attacks.

It was founded in 1971 from a group formed in Milan, the Metropolitan Political Collective.

Initially its activities were limited to kidnapping and chaining up right-wing employers and trade unionists, but in June 1974 two neo-fascists from the Italian Social Movement in Padua became the group's first murder victims.

Three months later two of the brigades' main leaders, Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini, were arrested, although Curcio managed to escape the following year only to be rearrested.

The group's most notorious act came in 1978 when Moro was seized and five of his bodyguards killed.

Moro, a leader of Italy's now defunct Christian Democrat Party, was kidnapped, kept in a secret hideout in Rome and murdered three months later.

Senior government adviser Massimo D'Antona was murdered by the group in 1999

Following his murder, police launched a massive crackdown on the Red Brigades and by the early 1980s the guerrilla movement was believed to have been wiped out.

But in 1985, the group killed another government economics adviser, Ezio Tarantelli, whose American wife, later was elected to the Italian parliament.

In 1988, Roberto Ruffilli, an academic and government adviser, was also assassinated.

This week, Interior Minister Claudio Scajola has said police believed the guerrilla group was made up of "dozens of people at the time of the D'Antona murder and are still a small group."

He added: "Now we need an absolute unity between the forces of the state, the political parties and all citizens."