A former terrorist whose testimony helped break up the resurgent Red Brigades urban guerrilla group was granted house arrest on Tuesday.
Cinzia Banelli had been serving a 12-year sentence for her role in the murder of labor ministry aide Massimo D'Antona, who was gunned down in a Rome street in July 1999.
She was also serving a concurrent sentence for her involvement in the March 2002 murder in Bologna of another labor ministry consultant, Marco Biagi.
Known within the terrorist group as 'Comrade So', Banelli will now enter a witness protection program with her five-year-old daughter and husband.
It was Banelli's maternity which apparently convinced her to turn state's witness after she was arrested in Pisa, where she worked as a radiologist in a local hospital, in October 2003.
Banelli helped investigators to enter computer files belonging to the Red Brigades-Party of Communist Combatants (BR-PCC), a group which claimed to be the heirs to Italy's most infamous leftist militant group, the Red Brigades, which spread terror in the 1970s and 1980s, including the kidnapping and murder of Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro in 1978.
The computer evidence along with testimony provided by Banelli led to the convictions of and life sentences for BR-PCC leaders Nadia Desdemona Lioce, Marco Morandi, Marco Mezzasalma, Diana Blefari Melazzi and Simone Boccaccini.
The computer files were on two palm pilots found on Lioce when she was arrested after a March 2003 shoot-out on a Rome-Florence train which left one rail policeman dead, another seriously wounded and a second suspected BR-PCC member, Mario Galesi, fatally wounded.
Documents found on Lioce and Galesi allowed police to arrest the other key BR-PCC leaders in October 2003.
