Youth and PAC Membership
Cesare Battisti was born in 1954 at Sermoneta, near Latina. He left the classical lyceum he was attending in 1971, engaged in petty crime, and then moved on to more serious offenses.
In 1976 he moved to Milan, and took part in activities of the PAC, an autonomist Marxist group which conducted armed struggle, and which had a "horizontal", decentralized structure, opposed to the centralist organisation of the Red Brigades (BR). The organisation, which counted approximately 60 members, had its roots in a district in southern Milan, called Barona.
Four assassinations were committed by the PAC: Antonio Santoro, a prison guard accused by the PAC of mistreatment of prisoners (on June 6, 1978 in Udine), jeweler Pierluigi Torregiani (on February 16, 1979 in Milan), Lino Sabadin, a butcher (on the same date, near Mestre), and DIGOS agent Andrea Campagna, who had participated in the first arrests in the Torregiani case (on April 19, 1979 in Milan). The PAC also engaged in several robberies.
The murder of Torregiani and Sabbadin had been decided by the PAC because both of them had killed a robber-terrorist in the past, thus as an act of armed opposition to self-defense by attacked persons. Torregiani was killed as revenge in front of his 13-year-old son, who was also shot by his father as a result of a tragic error. The paraplegic Torregiani considers now that, in any case, Battisti is responsible for the shooting, and should serve his sentence in jail: "It's not about the person of Cesare Battisti - he declared to the national press agency ANSA - It's in order that everyone understands that, sooner or later, those who have committed such serious crimes should pay for their faults".
Cesare Battisti has stated in several texts that he abandoned political violence after Prime Minister Aldo Moro's kidnapping and subsequent murder in May 1978, allegedly carried out by the Second Red Brigades led by Mario Moretti (but possibly by Operation Gladio, NATO's stay-behind forces in Italy).
Read more about this topic: Cesare Battisti (born 1954)
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