KEY POINTS:
A political storm blew up yesterday after Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the French first lady, admitted she had helped to persuade her husband to block the extradition of a hunger-striking left-wing terrorist to Italy.
The Italian-born Bruni-Sarkozy's intervention in what was already an explosive Franco-Italian issue is the first overt example of the "gut left-wing" first lady and pop singer influencing the right-wing President.
The Elysee Palace announced yesterday that Marina Petrella, 54, a leader of the Rome cell of the ultra-left Red Brigades terrorist movement from 1976-82, would not, after all, be extradited to Italy.
Petrella, who has lived in France for 15 years, was arrested soon after President Nicolas Sarkozy came to power last year promising a tougher approach to crime and terrorism.
The former Italian terrorist leader, who has a husband and two children in France, began a hunger strike which she continued even after she was released from custody by a French court two months ago.
It emerged yesterday that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy had visited an extremely weak Petrella in hospital last Wednesday to tell her her extradition would be cancelled on "humanitarian" grounds.
The first lady also admitted, in a startlingly frank interview with a French newspaper yesterday, that she and her sister, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, had mounted a concerted campaign to persuade Sarkozy to block the extradition.
"We could not let this woman die," Bruni-Sarkozy told Liberation. "The situation had become intolerable, dangerous."
Bruni-Sarkozy described herself this year as a "gut left-winger" who intends to work for humanitarian causes. Her concern for the fate of Petrella may appear strange because she and Valeria, an actress and film director, are part of a wealthy Milanese industrial family which fled Italy for France in the 1970s to escape the threat of the Red Brigades and other terrorist groups.
News of the first lady's intervention and the cancellation of Petrella's extradition provoked fury in Italy. An Italian support group for victims of domestic terrorism said it had chartered a train to bring its members to Paris to demonstrate outside the Elysee Palace next weekend.
Bruno Berardi, president of the association, said the train would be filled by "members of dozens of families [of victims of terror] crippled by grief and outraged by the lack of concern they have been shown".
Isabella Bertolini, an ally of the right-wing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, said it was a "poor joke" to give humanitarian consideration to a woman "convicted of murder, robbery and kidnapping".
In her interview with Liberation, Bruni-Sarkozy said the decision should be seen as an act of humanitarian understanding, not a "defeat for the Italian justice system".
Although she gave most of the credit for changing Sarkozy's mind to the persuasive powers of her sister, Bruni-Sarkozy helped organise a series of meetings in recent days between the President and Petrella's lawyer and doctors.
It is unusual for a French President to allow himself to be lobbied directly in this way. Quite apart from the rights and wrongs of a complex case, the President's decision will renew concerns in France about Sarkozy's intensely personal, and some say clannish, style of government.
It will also reinforce fears within the President's centre-right party that Sarkozy's promise to deliver an "unashamed" authoritarian approach to crime, terrorism and immigration is being undermined by his wife.
In an interview with the French radio station Europe 1 yesterday, Bruni-Tedeschi said she had met Sarkozy on several occasions to discuss the Petrella case and he had "absolutely listened" to her.
Since her extradition was ordered this year, Petrella is said by her doctors to have suffered not just from her hunger strike but from a "collapse of the will to live".
Petrella has been convicted in Italy of organising a series of terrorist actions by the Rome branch of the Red Brigades, including the murder of a police chief and the kidnapping and murder of the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978.
She spent eight years in jail in Italy before her trial in 1988. Just before she was finally sentenced to life imprisonment in 1993, she fled to France, taking advantage of an amnesty declared by President Francois Mitterrand for Italian ultra-left-wingers prepared to forswear the "infernal machine" of terrorism.
- INDEPENDENT
