A resurgent Red Brigade group smashed earlier this week was ready to strike using automatic weapons and fake police uniforms, Italian officials said Thursday.
The arms cache discovered Wednesday near Padua, officials said, included a kalashnikov, an Uzi, three hand guns, bulletproof vests and the fake uniforms.
It showed the "operational efficiency the group had reached and the danger they posed," the government said.
"It was the complete equipment needed to carry out any kind of attack," police said.
Premier Romano Prodi said authorities would have to come up with "a much stronger analysis and surveillance" of "a phenomenon that has not been completely uprooted".
"We have to be vigilant now and perhaps for a long time in the future," Prodi said, amid signs that the suspects arrested Monday enjoyed continued support in far-left circles.
""We must never let our guard down," the premier said, urging the trade union movement to show "greater vigilance" against being infiltrated.
Seven members of Italy's largest union CGIL were among the 15 suspects grabbed Monday with plans to hit a government aide and other targets.
In the wake of the police round-up, slogans supporting the suspected terrorists have been appearing on northern factories and websites run by far-left movements.
Among those in the terrorists' sights was labour ministry consultant Pietro Ichino, who has been under police escort since March 2002.
Ichino was given the escort right after the Red Brigades murdered labour ministry consultant Marco Biagi in Bologna.
Biagi was the second ministry aide to be shot down after Massimo D'Antona was killed by the Red Brigades in Rome in May 1999.
Other targets being considered by the terrorists included a villa in Milan owned by ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi, transmission towers for Berlusconi's private TV empire and Rupert Murdoch's Sky Italia, the Milan offices of conservative daily Libero, and facilities belonging to oil giant ENI.
The government said Thursday that none of these targets had been in "direct and immediate" danger but security around them had now been stiffened.
Italian police have been trying for years to mop up the remnants of the terror group that claimed dozens of lives in the 1970s and '80s including that of Christian Democrat statesman Aldo Moro in 1978.
The new group has apparently been trying to recruit members in universities, factories and extraparliamentary leftist movements - as happened in the '70s.
