Former Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi was one of the targets of a Red Brigade–style terror plan thwarted by Italian police last week. Berlusconi’s home in central Milan was on a hit list of objectives among documents found on the 15 suspects, arrested throughout the north of Italy, police said. A top labour lawyer and government advisor, Pietro Ichino, was on the hit list as well. A ‘cell’ in Padua, had been engaged in ‘target practice’ ahead of a possible attempt to kill someone. The various groups were planning to attack transmitters owned by Berlusconi’s Mediaset group and Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Italia TV company. Also on the hit list was oil giant ENI and an engineering firm unsuccessfully sued by industrial asbestos victims. Police think that the first attack would probably have been on the Milan office of the conservative daily Libero.
‘It was scheduled for this coming Easter. We have probably foiled a terrorist attack’, said interior minister Giuliano Amato, hailing the results of the two-and-a-half-year police investigation. Police rounded up the suspects in Milan, Padua, Turin and Trieste.
