The day after the German government foolishly allowed a member of Baader-Meinhof to receive probation, the Italians have arrested fifteen members of the leftist Red Brigade, which promised to attack a "capitalist" target, the Milan newspaper, in the near future:
It began with the chance discovery in a Milan basement of a very unusual bicycle. Chief Superintendent Giuseppina Suma described how, following a tip off, police had examined the bike and found "a minute camera in the front light and a radio transmitter under the saddle".
It was the start of a three-year investigation that led this week to more than 80 raids in four Italian cities and the arrest of 15 people for alleged offences that seemed like echoes of an anguished past.
Italians opening their newspapers yesterday could be forgiven for thinking they had fallen into a time warp and spiralled back to the days of flared trousers, Zapata moustaches, Bee Gee hits - and murderous far-left terrorism.
One of those arrested declared himself a "political prisoner". The media reported on clandestine newsletters solemnly assessing the "current political condition of the masses". And Italy's interior minister, Giulano Amato, said the combined operation, involving police and officers of the civil intelligence service, SISDE, showed that the last embers of the Red Brigades, founded 37 years ago, had yet to be stamped out.
Radical Leftism has yet to fall out of favor in parts of Europe. One probable reason for this is that many in European circles were fellow travelers when these groups agitated for socialism during the 1960s and 1970s, and are sympathetic to their original aims. The Red Brigade and Baader-Meinhof are no different from al Qaeda terrorists except they use a different ideology to justify mass murder.
In related news, France has rounded up eleven suspected al Qaeda terrorists:
French counterterrorism police arrested 11 suspects as part of efforts aimed at dismantling an alleged al-Qaida-linked recruiting network to send radical Islamic fighters to Iraq, police officials said Wednesday.
Nine suspects were detained in and near the southern city of Toulouse before dawn Wednesday, following the arrest of two others at Orly airport in Paris who had just been sent home by Syrian authorities, police said.
Two of the suspects, mostly aged in their 20s, had sought to enter Iraq through neighboring Syria, but were detained by police there and remanded into French custody, police said. An investigation was continuing.
Regardless of the ideology, groups who use violence to intimidate elected governments are no different from those who commit violence to impose their religious beliefs onto others. It's all terrorism that requires a strong and unyielding response.
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