In the northern city of Genoa, an anonymous message arrived last Friday at the regional headquarters of the Italian Union of Labour (UIL), one of Italy’s three biggest trade union federations. “You will pay dearly, all of you will pay,” it said. Misleadingly or not, the message evoked the two most serious incidents of domestic terrorism of the past four years: the murders in May 1999 and March 2002 respectively of Massimo D’Antona and Marco Biagi, two government advisers on industrial relations and labour market reform. The killings, still unsolved, have been blamed on a group styling itself the Red Brigades, the name of the ultra-leftist underground movement whose bullet-spraying political violence turned the 1970s and early 1980s into what Italians call the “years of lead”. This weekend is the 25th anniversary of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, a former Christian Democrat prime minister who was seized by Red Brigade commandos on March 16 1978 and held hostage for 55 days. After a “people’s trial”, in which his kidnappers claimed he supplied information about Christian Democrat corruption and state-sponsored far-right violence, Moro was shot dead. His body was dumped in the boot of a Renault in central Rome. This week, Italian television programmes have replayed footage of the events of 1978 and asked if the nation is at risk of another era of home-grown terrorism. Full Story
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