Red Brigade woman says group killed two advisers

A member of a splinter faction of Italy's Red Brigades, arrested last month after a shoot-out in a train, admitted yesterday killing two prominent government advisers involved in the overhaul of employment laws.

In a note handwritten in block letters, Desdemona Lioce, 43, said: "I claim responsibility for organising the actions taken against Massimo D'Antona and Mario Biagi." The admission was in a letter delivered yesterday to two Roman prosecuting magistrates, Franco Ionta and Pietro Saviotti.

D'Antona was shot dead in May 1999 and Biagi in March last year. They were experts on labour law drafted in by the Minister of Labour to advise successive governments. They were giving expert help in the drafting of reforms intended to liberalise Italy's employment laws, making it easier for employers to sack their workers and depriving Italians of their cherished "jobs for life."

Both men were 51 and were killed close to their homes, D'Antona in Rome and Biagi in Bologna. The Interior Ministry said that the same gun was used on both.

A group calling itself the New Red Brigades for the Construction of the Combative Communist Party claimed responsibility for the murder of D'Antona. After Biagi's death, an anonymous call to a Bologna newspaper claimed that the second murder was the work of the same organisation. A five-pointed star, the symbol of the Red Brigades, was scrawled on a wall near where Biagi's body was found.

The murders were traumatic for Italy, evoking the "Years of Lead" in the 1970s and 1980s when the original Red Brigades – formed by student protesters dedicating themselves to the armed struggle against the capitalist state – kidnapped and/or murdered prominent politicians and judges, and anarchists and fascist agents provocateurs killed many others in bomb and grenade blasts.

The group's most notorious coup was the kidnap and murder of the former prime minister Aldo Moro 25 years ago this spring. After mass arrests in 1989, the group, thought then to number no more than 50, died away, But unlike Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang, it never conceded defeat.

Desdemona Lioce, a fugitive for many years, was travelling from Rome to Florence by train with a Brigades colleague, Mario Galesi, when police swarmed on for what they said was a "routine" inspection of identity documents. Lioce and Galesi handed over forged ones, an argument started, then Galesi pointed a gun at an officer's throat. There was a struggle and shots were fired, killing a policeman, Emanuele Petri, and wounding a second officer and Galesi, who later died despite an operation.

Although the policeman died, the arrest of Lioce was, in retrospect, a lucky break for the state. Apart from the gun, Lioce and Galesi had many items of interest to police, including a video camera hidden in a cigarette packet, a palmtop computer and lists of names and addresses. Her name was promptly linked to the murder of D'Antona but she refused to answer questions, describing herself as a political prisoner.

But her true Red Brigades credentials showed through when she sent a 10-page handwritten memo to a prosecuting magistrate in Rome, describing her political background and explaining how her faction of the Red Brigades was dedicated to fighting imperialism. The old Brigades terrorists would often leave long, handwritten accounts of their rationale at their crime scenes.

Lioce also declared common cause with the world's Muslims in their struggle against imperialism. Since November, when Osama bin Laden included Italy in countries that "deserve" to be attacked, there has been wide anxiety over Islamist cells in Italy. But no concrete links have been found so far between the new Red Brigades and Islamist terrorists.