| schema:articleBody
| - Former communist militant Cesare Battisti has gone on hunger strike to protest his Italian jail conditions where he is being held in solitary confinement, Italian news reports said Tuesday. Battisti, 65, has been kept in isolation for a year-and-a-half after admitting to four murders carried out in the 1970s which were part of a failed bid to spark a far-left revolution. "Having exhausted all other means to assert my rights, I find myself forced to resort to a total hunger strike and to refuse medical care," Battisti said in a letter to his lawyer published by Italian media. Davide Steccanella told the ANSA news agency his client had been cut off from "all contact and activity" in the high-security Oristano prison on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, where he was supposed to have only been in solitary confinement for six months. Jailed in 1979 for belonging to an armed revolutionary group outlawed in Italy, Battisti escaped from prison two years later and spent nearly four decades on the run. An international police operation eventually tracked him down and arrested him in Bolivia in January last year, before he was extradited to Italy. Battisti was sentenced in absentia to life for having killed a policeman and a prison guard; for taking part in the murder of a butcher who was also a far-right militant; and for helping plan the slaying of a jeweller, who died in a shootout that left his teenage son in a wheelchair. A few weeks after being jailed he admitted to the four murders carried out during Italy's so-called "Years of Lead", a decade of violence beginning in the late 1960s that saw dozens of deadly attacks by hardline left-wing and right-wing groups. He is now in jail in the island prison that houses more than 250 convicts, many of them under tough conditions usually applied to mafia members. After his jailbreak, Battisti had reinvented himself as an author, writing a string of noir novels. In 2004, he skipped bail in France where, like many other far-left Italian militants, he had taken refuge. He then went to live undercover in Brazil until he was arrested in 2007 in Rio de Janeiro. After Battisti had spent years in custody, then-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva issued a decree -- later upheld by Brazil's Supreme Court -- in 2010 refusing his extradition to Italy, and he was freed, angering Rome. But last year Battisti was seized without a struggle in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in an operation carried out by a joint team of Italian and Bolivian officers. cm-jhe/fec
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)