Alvaro Lojacono

Alvaro Lojacono (born 7 May 1955) is an Italian former communist militant and terrorist.

Early life Lojacono was born in Milan, Italy on 7 May 1955 to parents doctor Giuseppe Lojacono, a Communist Party member, and Ornella Baragiola, a Swiss citizen.

When he was three years old, Lojacono's family moved to Rome, where he entered the Swiss elementary school of the city. In 1960, his parents separated without a divorce. He followed, along with his sister Silvana, their mother first to Ticino, then to Savosa, and eventually to Rimini, where Ornella Baragiola worked as the manager of the Italian-Swiss cultural center. After being ejected from Florence's Castelnuovo scientific high school, Lojacono returned to his father in Rome and enrolled in an arts school, where he became engaged in left-wing activism.

On 28 February 1975, the trial began in Rome of members of the extreme-left organization Potere Operaio, accused for the arson attack against the home of MSI undersecretary Mario Mattei and his family on Primavalle street, which resulted in the death of two of his children and the serious injury of two other persons.

Throughout the trial, there were continuous, severe, and violent clashes around the court area and elsewhere in the streets of Rome between right-wing and left-wing radicals. In a riot outside the MSI headquarters in Ottaviano street, shots were fired killing the Greek medical student and neofascist sympathizer Mikis Mantakas. The police investigation of the crime resulted in the indictment of two left-wing militants known to the police, one of whom was Alvaro Lojacono. In the first trial, Lojacono was acquitted for lack of evidence, but, on appeal in 1980, he was found guilty and sentenced to 16 years in prison.

In 1981, he went underground and became a wanted man. While Lojacono was in hiding, the judiciary investigation uncovered additional aspects of his past. Lojacono had become, since 1977, a member of the "Roman column" of the Brigate Rosse through the recommendation of his friend and Brigades gunman Valerio Morucci.

He was identified as a participant in the murder of 14 persons, in two kidnappings and in one armed robbery.

Trials in Italy An official indictment was issued in 1981 against him, and fifty-six other defendants, for the kidnapping of the Christian Democrat councilor Ciro Cirillo. He was also indicted in 1982 for the murder of the Campania regional councilor Raffaele Delcogliano. The same year, the Ministry of the Interior named Lojacono among the nine most wanted members of the Red Brigades.

He was tried in absentia for the 1978 murder of magistrate Girolamo Tartaglione; for the 1979 murder of two public security officers during the Red Brigades' armed assault on the Rome offices of the Christian Democratic Party; the murder of colonel Antonio Varisco and Marshal Mariano Romiti, both of the Carabinieri; and for the 1980 armed robbery at the Ministry of Communications. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

He was finally accused of participating in the 1978 kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro, Christian Democrat leader and supporter of the "historic compromise" between his party and the Communists. The indictment described Lojacono as being present on 16 March 1978 in Fani street, at the site of the Red Brigades attack against the Moro column of cars, firing at Moro's guards and taking the politician in a Brigades hiding place.

Fugitive Lojacono fled to Algeria in 1981, following, as he claimed many years later, the advice of his father who had been a supporter and friend of Algerian independence movement militants, while also asserting that he was indirectly helped by the Italian Communist Party.

After nine years of detention, in 1997, Baragiola was granted work release, which he used to follow a journalism course. In October 1999, he was released unconditionally.

In interviews given to Swiss and Italian media, Lojacono indicated that he would "not oppose" his extradition to Italy.