A Paris appeals court has denied
Italy's request for the extradition of 10 former leftist
terrorists who have been living in France for decades.
The 10 were arrested last year, 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 formers terrorists were members of the Red Brigades,
the group that abducted and murdered former Italian premier Aldo
Moro in 1978.
They also include Giorgio 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.
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