ROME: Former communist militant Cesare Battisti has admitted four murders carried out in the 1970s, weeks after he was jailed in Italy for the killings that were part of a failed bid to spark a far-left revolution.
Battisti, 64, admitted all the charges brought against him “in four murder cases” during Italy’s so-called “Years of Lead”, Milan prosecutor Alberto Nobili was quoted as saying by Italian media on Monday.
He also reportedly admitted that armed revolution was wrong, Nobili said.
Nobili, who questioned Battisti at a high-security prison in Sardinia for nine hours over the weekend, said it had “felt like I was watching the liberation of someone who was initially embarrassed, troubled.”
“I realise the bad I have done and apologise to the families,” Nobili quoted Battisti as saying.
Jailed in 1979 for belonging to an armed revolutionary group outlawed in Italy, Battisti escaped from prison two years later and spent nearly four decades on the run.
An international police operation eventually tracked him down and arrested him in Bolivia in January, before he was extradited to Italy.
Battisti was sentenced to life for having killed a policeman and a prison guard, for taking part in the murder of a butcher and for helping plan the slaying of a jeweller who died in a shootout that left his teenaged son in a wheelchair.
The murdered policeman’s brother Maurizio Campagna said “apologies now seem out of place.”
“I think his lawyer is advising him so he can have his sentence lowered,” Campagna told Italy’s Sky TG24 television.
Battisti is serving his sentence in a Sardinian prison housing more than 250 convicts, many of them living under the tough “41-bis” prison regime usually applied to Mafia members.
Battisti admitted the killings “little by little... not as a flood”, Nobili said.
“The armed struggle prevented the development of a cultural, social and political revolution which, from the events of ‘68, would have been absolutely positive,” Nobili quoted Battisti as saying.
After his jailbreak, Battisti had reinvented himself as an author, writing a string of noir novels.
In 2004, he skipped bail in France where, like many other far-left Italian militants, he had taken refuge. He then went to live clandestinely in Brazil until he was arrested in 2007 in Rio de Janeiro.
— AFP
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
