BUENOS AIRES (The Thursday Times) — Leonardo Bertulazzi, a 74-year-old former member of Italy’s Red Brigades, has escaped from house arrest in Buenos Aires while awaiting extradition to Italy, Argentina’s security ministry said on Wednesday, and has offered a reward of 20 million pesos, about $13,000, for information leading to his capture.
Italian courts convicted him in his absence in the 1980s of terrorism-related crimes, and he faces a combined sentence of 27 years in prison.
A tampered tag
Police said Bertulazzi left his fifth-floor flat in the centre of the city early on Tuesday, lowering himself onto the terraces of a neighbouring building, crossing a vacant lot and climbing over a gate to reach the street.
The escape was not noticed at once because he had tampered with his electronic ankle monitor so that it kept sending temperature readings after he removed it, officials said. Officers became suspicious when the tag stopped registering any movement, and found it left behind in the flat.
Explosives specialists were called in to examine the device before it was handled, given his past in an armed group, but they found it had been altered only to stop the alarm from sounding.
The Years of Lead
The Red Brigades were a far-left terrorist group behind a wave of kidnappings and killings in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, a period known as the “Years of Lead”. In 1978 the group kidnapped and murdered former prime minister Aldo Moro.
Bertulazzi belonged to the group’s Genoa branch, which kidnapped the naval engineer Pietro Costa in 1977 and held him for 81 days before a ransom was paid. Argentine authorities have said he was also involved in the logistics of Moro’s kidnapping.
Decades on the run
He was first arrested in Argentina in 2002, after entering from Chile on a false passport. A judge rejected Italy’s extradition request the following year, and he was granted refugee status in 2004, living freely in the country for two decades.
Argentina revoked that status in 2024 under President Javier Milei and arrested him again that August. Its Supreme Court cleared his extradition last year, after rejecting his final appeal.
Wanda Ferro, an undersecretary at Italy’s interior ministry, said Argentine police were responsible for handing him over and that she hoped the extradition could take place “very quickly” once he is recaptured.
