Italy arrests Red Brigades suspect
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Police show off part of the huge cache of explsoves and weapons they found in a Rome flat.
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ROME, Italy (Reuters) -- Italian police have arrested a suspected member of the Red Brigades urban guerrilla group whom they accuse of renting a basement in Rome where a 100 kg (220 lb) cache of explosives was found two days before.
Police discovered the explosives on Saturday in what the interior minister hailed as a key advance in the probe into two political murders claimed by the group, a modern incarnation of the original Red Brigades who terrorized Italy in the 1970s.
The hideout also contained pistols and hand grenades, false identity papers and the original document claiming responsibility for one of the murders.
It had been rented in the name of Diana Blefari Melazzi, a 35-year-old Roman woman, whom police arrested at a seaside villa in the province of Rome in a raid before dawn on Monday.
They said they found false documents and about 20 wads of 50- and 100-euro notes in the villa but no weapons.
Nine suspected members of the Red Brigades were arrested in October and police said Melazzi went into hiding at that time.
The nine are accused of involvement in the murders of Massimo D'Antona and Marco Biagi, two senior Labor Ministry advisers.
D'Antona was shot dead on his way to work in Rome in May 1999, while Biagi was gunned down in front of his house in the northern city of Bologna in March 2002. The new Red Brigades claimed responsibility for both killings.
The murders raised fears of a revival of the "years of lead" in the 1970s and early 1980s, when urban guerrilla groups from the far left and right littered Italy's streets with bullets.
Police made their first major breakthrough in the two cases in March this year, when they nabbed two suspected Red Brigades members after a gunbattle in a moving train in which one policeman was shot dead.
Then came the nine October arrests, which the interior minister said had broken the back of the guerrilla group and which quelled fears of a resurgence of the violence.
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