Italy's biggest trade union CGIL vowed Friday to crack down on extremists after more of its members were implicated in a Red Brigades probe.
"We'll get rid of the bad apples," CGIL leader Guglielmo Epifani said after it emerged that 20 of his members are under investigation in addition to seven arrested in a 15-strong Red Brigade group Monday.
The group, caught with plans to hit a government aide and other targets, was ready to strike using automatic weapons and fake police uniforms.
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.
Four militants, one a CGIL member, were arrested on Tuesday night as they were about to stick up posters.
"We know how to weed these people out," Epifani said, responding to calls for greater vigilance against infiltration.
"We'll win this battle through the force of our ideas".
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 immediately 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.
Italian police have been trying for years to mop up the remnants and self-proclaimed heirs of the Red Brigades, a large urban guerrilla organisation 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.
