A decision by French President Nicolas Sarkozy not to extradite a former member of the Red Brigades, the group that terrorized Italy throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, has provoked outrage in Italy and stirred dormant tensions between the two countries.
The decision also raised questions about the role played by the first lady of France, Carla Sarkozy, who had visited the former member, Marina Petrella, last week and personally assured her that she would not be extradited.
Petrella was convicted of involvement in murder and other crimes in Italy, and in 1993 fled to France, where former president Francois Mitterrand had a policy of granting asylum to leftist Italian militants if they renounced violence. But later French governments moved away from that policy, and Petrella was jailed in August last year.
Last August, she was released after her health deteriorated because of severe depression. She had stopped eating, her lawyer, Irene Terrel, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.
“She just wanted to die,” Terrel said.
Sarkozy announced over the weekend that Petrella, 54, hospitalized in Paris, would not be extradited for what he called humanitarian reasons.
Sabina Rossa, a center-left lawmaker whose father was killed by the Red Brigades in 1979, said on a morning radio talk show on Tuesday that Sarkozy’s justification was unacceptable.
“It’s saying that Italy is a country at risk, without democratic certainties, where a person’s health is not evaluated seriously,” she said.
Rossa said that France had a distorted view of what life was like in Italy during the years of terrorism.
“There are people who committed atrocious crimes and left a trail of blood, but in France there are those who see them as victims of political persecution, with an aura of the romantic hero,” she said.
Petrella was convicted of involvement in various Red Brigades activities in Rome from 1977 to 1982, including the kidnapping and murder of Moro; the murder of General Enrico Galvaligi, the head of anti-terrorist forces in northern Italy; the murder of a police commissioner and the kidnapping of a magistrate.
Since her arrest last year, groups in France have protested her expected extradition. Several high-profile personalities, including the French first lady and her sister, the actress Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, have sympathized with Petrella.
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