France's supreme Court of Cassation
on Tuesday confirmed its refusal to extradite 10 former leftist
terrorists, mostly ex- members of the Red Brigades (BR) group
which dominated Italy's Year of Lead in the 1970s and 80s.
The high court upheld a lower court's ruling on June 29 last
year denying extradition for eight men including Giorgio
Pietrostefani, a Lotta Continua (Constant Struggle) leader
sentenced to life for his part in the murder of Milan police
chief Luigi Calabresi on May 17, 1972, and two women including
former BR members Marina Petrella and Roberta Cappelli.
The Parisian prosecutor general's office had appealed to the
Cassation Court against the lower court's decision to refuse
Italy's extradition request for the 10 former leftist terrorists
who had taken refuge in France.
The appeal refers to articles six and eight of the European
Convention on Human Rights regarding the right to a fair trial
and respecting private and family life.
French President Emmanuel Macron had said the ex-BR members
should on the contrary be judged in Italy.
"They should be judged on Italian soil," he said.
Macron was speaking a day after the Paris appeals court denied
Italy's request.
The 10 were arrested in 2021, a move that seemed to have ended
the so-called Mitterrand Doctrine that shielded Italian former
terrorists from Italian justice as long as they gave up the
armed struggle, before being released under various forms of
guarded liberty.
Many of the former terrorists were members of the Red Brigades,
the group that abducted and murdered former Italian premier Aldo
Moro in 1978.
They also include Pietrostefani, who has been convicted
in Italy for conspiracy in helping order the 1972 murder of
Milan police commissioner Luigi Calabresi in retaliation for the
1969 death of an innocent railway worker and anarchist bombing
suspect, Giuseppe Pinelli.
Pinelli fell from a police station window in what late Nobel
prizewinning playwright and leftist activist Dario Fo called, in
his famed play, The Accidental Death of an Anarchist.
Pietrostefani was a leading member of the hard-left group Lotta
Continua, whose leader Adriano Sofri served much of a 22 year
sentence for ordering the murder of Calabresi, who had been
cleared of all responsibility in Pinelli's death after the
Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan that killed 17 people and
injured 88, sparking the Years of Lead of rightist and leftist
terror.
The ruling denying Pietrostefani's extradition cited his age,
79, and his poor health after a string of operations.
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