From a prison tucked in the Tuscan hills, a suspected member of the latest generation of the Red Brigades guerrilla group has begun to crack under pressure, revealing hiding places, secret codes, accomplices and crimes, law enforcement officials say.
As the lips of the informer loosen, so does the grip of the homegrown left-wing group on a country that must now increasingly wrestle with terrorist threats from abroad.
"There are two fronts," said Raimondo Catanzaro, a sociology professor at the University of Bologna and the author of The Red Brigades and Left-Wing Terrorism in Italy, referring to domestic and international terrorism.
"But these confessions inflict a harsh blow that may help to dismantle" the Red Brigades organization, he said.
Government officials and the police are optimistic that the new information may lead to more arrests and finally stamp out a group whose violence has plagued Italy off and on for decades.
The Red Brigades have been prematurely declared dead before, though, only to re-emerge years later.
"The Red Brigades is a brand that no one owns," Catanzaro said. "The first time around it was tragedy, the second time farce, but with some tragedy, too. They still killed people."
In the hopes of shedding light on killings committed by the new Red Brigades, especially of government labor consultants in 1999 and 2002, investigators have spent the last few weeks grilling the suspect, Cinzia Banelli, 41.
The police said another suspected member, Bruno di Giovannangelo, 45, was also cooperating, but was less helpful.
The two suspects have painted the picture of a small and poorly financed operation riddled by infighting and folly. Banelli had difficulty this week remembering the exact location of a cache of ammunition, which resulted in something of a wild goose chase by investigators.
The apparent lack of sophistication of the current group is a stark contrast to its precursors in the 1970s and 1980s, a period known as the "years of lead."
The most high-profile episode was in 1978, when the Red Brigades kidnapped and killed former Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
"They brought into question the identity and the security of the nation," said Catanzaro.
Thus the appearance of the group's trademark circled stars near the crime scenes where the government advisers were assassinated raised a specter that haunted Italy until a breakthrough early this year.
In March, a gunfight broke out on a train traveling from Rome to Florence, between two Red Brigades suspects and the police, who had asked to see their identity cards. The shooting left a police officer and a suspect dead, but it also produced notebooks full of leads.
"It would have been tough if it weren't for what happened on the train," conceded Gianfranco Bernabei, who directs Florence's antiterrorism unit.
The clues led to a series of raids and arrests across the country, including the capture of Banelli, who this month became the first Red Brigades suspect to turn state informant since the group returned to action.
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