ROME: The Italian government on Friday claimed to have smashed the core of the Red Brigades terrorists with an extensive police operation that put six people behind bars, including the alleged killers of the first victim to be claimed by the group four years ago.

More than a 1,000 officers raided some 100 locations in and around Rome, near Venice and in Tuscany. Police said that behind the operation lay a hi-tech investigation in which clues were found by delving into information held on electronic personal organisers and mobile phone Sim cards, and on at least occasion by craftily obtaining a sample of a suspect’s DNA.

The interior minister, Giuseppe Pisanu, said: “The main root of the new Red Brigades has been cut out.”

A judge in Florence was last night questioning the four men and two women arrested. All were charged with belonging to a terrorist organisation, and all but one were charged with the murder in 1999 of Massimo D’Antona, a government consultant on employment law.

The efforts by successive Italian governments to free up Italy’s rigid labour market have been the prime target of the reborn Red Brigades. Unlike their militant left predecessors of the 1970s and 1980s, the terrorists of the Red Brigades-Fighting Communist party (BR-PCC) are not alienated working-class students with a dream of global revolution.

They are mostly low-paid public sector employees — several are hospital porters and social workers — and their aim is to stop the creeping, though so far modest, neo-liberalisation of the Italian economy. Three years after killing Mr D’Antona, they gunned down his successor, Marco Biagi.

Official sources said the warrants authorising the raids and arrests which began early on Friday were sought on “urgent operational grounds”. But there is bound to be a suspicion that they were timed to coincide with the introduction of legislation based on Mr Biagi’s work that came into force on Friday.

The interior minister said the operation was “eloquent proof that you can kill men, but not their ideas”.

The breakthrough in the investigation into the new Red Brigades arose from a shoot-out on the road from Rome to Arezzo last March. A railway policeman was killed and two suspected terrorists, Nadia Lioce and Mario Galesi, were arrested.

Two electronic personal organisers belonging to Ms Lioce provided the police with a detailed, though encrypted, breakdown of the BR-PCC’s structure and activities.

Among other things, it included details of the disciplinary proceedings taken against a maverick member, codenamed Comrade SO. Police said she was one of those arrested on Friday — a 40- year-old hospital worker from Pisa called Cinzia Banelli.

By tracing other leads, often through intercepted calls from numbers found in the personal organisers, the police uncovered another suspect, Laura Proietti, 30, from Rome. She was followed by detectives who picked up a cigarette butt she had thrown away. Police said on Friday that the DNA of her saliva matched that of a hair found in a van used for the murder of Mr D’Antona.

The junior employment minister, Maurizio Sacconi, cautioned that many people who had aided and abetted the Red Brigades remained at large. He said there were still “several hundred people who have to be identified and isolated”.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service