French high court says final No to ex-BR extraditions

(ANSA) - ROME, MAR 28 - 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. (ANSA).