On June 2, the convicted Italian terrorist Cesare Battisti walked out of a Brazilian prison a free man. He did so after Brazil’s supreme court upheld the decision of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to refuse to extradite Battisti to Italy. A member of the left-wing terror group Armed Proletarians for Communism (PAC) during Italy’s blood-ridden “years of lead” in the 1970s, Battisti had been on the run from Italian justice for nearly thirty years, since escaping from a prison near Rome in October 1981.

In 1988, a Milan court convicted Battisti in absentia on four counts of murder or accessory to murder for his role in a series of four PAC “hits” in 1978 and 1979. Two of the victims were shopkeepers, a butcher and jeweler, and two were police officers. In two of the cases, Battisti himself is supposed to have fired the fatal shots.