Gun Ties Guerrilla Group to Advisor’s Slaying in Italy

Italy’s top security official said Wednesday that an offshoot of the Red Brigades guerrilla group killed Marco Biagi, co-author of a bitterly contested government bill that would make it easier to fire workers.

Interior Minister Claudio Scajola said that initial tests by police indicated that Biagi was shot Tuesday night with the same 9-millimeter handgun used in the 1999 slaying of another government advisor who was involved in a previous effort to liberalize the rigid labor code.

The Red Brigades for the Building of the Fighting Communist Party claimed responsibility for the 1999 killing in Rome of Massimo D’Antona. A caller saying he represents the same faction told an Italian newspaper on Wednesday that it was behind Tuesday’s hit in Bologna.

Scajola, who hurried home Wednesday from a shortened visit to the United States, told reporters that the weapons link “confirms we are dealing with the Red Brigades Fighting Communists.”

Biagi was a little-known economist, law professor and Labor Ministry advisor, but his slaying jolted the nation. Italians are passionately divided over the center-right government’s legislation and the leftist-led trade union movement’s bid to block it by calling a general strike next month.

Coupled with the 1999 slaying, Tuesday night’s violence was taken as a warning that domestic terrorism, a scourge that Italians thought they had defeated more than a decade ago, might prove to be a potent threat to economic reform.

Italy’s previous, center-left government also tried to liberalize the labor code but failed. Both slain advisors had served in that effort, and Biagi had been assigned government bodyguards for 13 months, until they were removed last October.

Police said Biagi, 51, was arriving home on a bicycle when at least three shots were fired from a motorcycle carrying two men. He was hit in the throat and in the chest and was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital.

It was only the second political killing attributed to a Red Brigades faction since 1988. The Red Brigades, along with rightist groups, bloodied Italy with terrorist attacks during the 1970s. The Red Brigades’ 1978 abduction and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro highlighted those so-called years of lead. By the early 1980s, police had all but wiped out the group.

Near Biagi’s home Wednesday, neighbors found a five-pointed star, the Red Brigades’ symbol, scratched on a wall. It was not clear when the star was put there.

The proposal co-authored by Biagi and approved last week by the Cabinet would suspend for four years an article of Italy’s 1970 labor code that makes it extremely difficult for employers, even in small or struggling companies, to dismiss workers without “just cause.”

Freed of such strictures, employers would be more willing to hire, the government contends. It says the four-year experiment would reduce Italy’s unemployment rate, which hovers just below 10% and is among the highest in the European Union.

“Since Italy has the worst labor market in Europe, we really have no alternative” but reform, Biagi wrote in an editorial published on the front page of Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s leading business newspaper, on the day he died.

Italy’s three big labor union federations, representing 12 million workers, have denounced the proposal as a threat to democracy and made it one of the most divisive issues of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s 9-month-old administration. Union leaders broke off talks with the government last week.

Berlusconi vowed Wednesday to push the proposal through Parliament, and some political analysts said he was now in a stronger position to succeed.

“Berlusconi cannot take any steps back now. Doing so would mean letting terrorism have the upper hand,” said Sergio Romano, a leading political commentator.

The government planned a state funeral for Biagi.

On Wednesday, the three union federations organized a rally in Bologna, attended by tens of thousands of people, and a two-hour work stoppage to protest the slaying. But they rejected Berlusconi’s appeal to resume the talks and call off their threatened general strike, saying they would meet next week to set a date for one.

Italy’s turmoil is being watched closely across the European Union, where laws protecting job security generally are stronger than in the United States. Leaders of the 15 EU countries, struggling to make the euro currency more competitive with the dollar, vowed at a summit last week to make labor markets more flexible.

The European Parliament opened its Wednesday session with a minute’s silence for the slain Italian.

“The construction of a country and of tomorrow’s Europe cannot be achieved in this climate of hate,” said European Commission President Romano Prodi, a Bologna native and friend of Biagi.