(Rome) A former leader of the Italian Red Brigades was arrested Thursday in Argentina, where he had fled and was living, after the recent revocation of his refugee status by the Argentine government of Javier Milei, Italian and Argentine authorities announced.
Leonardo Bertulazzi was arrested “following the revocation by the competent Argentine authorities of the refugee status he had obtained in 2004 from that State and the reiteration of the extradition request,” the Italian police said in a statement.
The septuagenarian, who is the subject of an international arrest warrant for homicide, attack and kidnapping, belonged to the Genoese section “March 28” of the Red Brigades which notably kidnapped and held captive a shipowner.
Bertulazzi was sentenced in 1987 to a cumulative sentence of 27 years in prison for subversive association and membership in an armed gang.
He had already been arrested in 2002 in Buenos Aires, but was released a few months later.
His arrest Thursday, at his home in Buenos Aires, is the result of “deep intelligence work” by the Argentine Ministry of Security, the Intelligence Directorate, and a “coordinated effort with the Italian authorities,” the Argentine ministry said in a statement.
The Ministry of Justice and the government’s chief of staff worked “to withdraw the terrorist’s recognition as a political refugee,” the ministry added.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has an avowed political affinity with Argentina’s ultra-liberal President Milei, expressed in a statement her “deep gratitude to the Argentine authorities” for the arrest.
The arrest “reflects Argentina’s commitment to the values of democracy and the rule of law, and illustrates to the world the firm decision not to live with murderers who go unpunished,” the Argentine ministry said.
Founded in 1973 by the Italian Renato Curcio and advocating Marxist-Leninist ideology, the Red Brigades (BR) injured or killed dozens of magistrates, politicians, journalists and industrialists during the 1970s.
According to the Argentine ministry, Leonardo Bertulazzi “had been linked to the logistics of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro”, the former head of the Italian government kidnapped in March 1978 and found dead almost two months later in the trunk of a car in the center of Rome.