ROME, March 20: The spectre of political violence returned to Italy for the first time in three years on Wednesday following the murder of a senior adviser to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right government.

Marco Biagi, a leading economist and an author of Berlusconi’s controversial new labour reforms, was shot dead as he arrived home by bicycle in the northern city of Bologna.

The killing had all the hallmarks of the politically motivated violence that plagued Italy in the 1970s and 1980s.

The banner headline in Rome’s La Repubblica newspaper — “Terrorism returns to kill again” — was echoed in every national newspaper.—Reuters