Grenoble (France): Anti-terrorism investigators are probing a series of bomb threats made against French trains in anonymous phone calls and a letter demanding freedom for an Italian leftist, a judicial official said.
The Paris prosecutors anti-terrorism unit opened an investigation on Sunday after a weekend of anonymous phone threats to firefighters in the eastern Savoie region and to the local newspaper, said Robert Bartoletti, prosecutor of Chambery yesterday.
Beginning Friday, seven anonymous telephone calls were made to the firefighters and to the daily Dauphine Libere, according to the prosecutor. In six of the calls, a man with a strong foreign accent claimed to have set a bomb either in the Annecy-Paris fast train or on the train tracks linking Annecy to Chambery, Bartoletti said.
No bombs have been discovered, the local prosecutor said, adding that, for the moment, a local issue could not be excluded.
After a seventh call containing directions, a letter was found in a phone booth. Written in Italian, it was signed "in memory of the Red Brigades," the prosecutor said. It demanded the liberation of Cesare Battisti, who has been held in Brazil since March 2007.
Battisti escaped from an Italian prison in 1981 while awaiting trial on four counts of murder committed when he was a member of the Armed Proletarians for Communism. He fled to France, where he reinvented himself as a mystery writer.
An Italian court later tried and convicted him in absentia and sentenced him to life in prison for two of the killings.
Source :
PTI
