Ready to go to Brazil to get Battisti - Salvini

(ANSA) - Rome, October 29 - Deputy Premier and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said Monday he was ready to go to Brazil and get former leftist terrorist Cesare Battisti if new President Jair Bolsonaro decides to extradite him to Italy as promised.
    "I can't wait to meet new president Bolsonaro," said Salvini, adding "I will be happy to got personally to Brazil also to go and get leftist terrorist Cesare Battisti and bring him back to Italian jails".
    Bolsonaro's son earlier on Monday suggested that the government is set to keep a promise to extradite Battisti. "The gift is coming! Thanks for the support, the right is becoming stronger," Eduardo Bolsonaro, a federal deputy, said in response to a tweet by Salvini congratulating Bolsonaro senior on his election victory.
    Justice Minister Alfonso Bonafede said Monday that Battisti must return to Italy.
    "Cesare Battisti must return. For months the ministry's offices have been in contact with Brazilian authorities, at the ready for an event that might change things, like Jair Bolsonaro's victory in the presidential elections," he said.
    "We are following the situation with the utmost attention. WE owe it to the families of Battisti's victims, we also owe it to the Country," Bonafede said on Facebook.
    Battisti, whose extradition was halted by former Brazilian president Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, is wanted to serve out several life sentences for murders in the so-called 'Years of Lead' of leftist and rightist terrorism.
    Battisti, who fled to Brazil from France where he had become a crime writer, after the end of the Mitterand Doctrine, has always denied committing murder.