The presence in the UK of wanted Italian fascist fugitives was a running scandal throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
They arrived here to avoid the crackdown which followed the bombing of Bologna railway station in 1980 and stayed here, making huge amounts of money from dodgy accommodation and employment agencies, till their prison sentences expired and they could return to Italy.
The two most prominent were Roberto Fiore and Massimo Morsello, both convicted in absentia of terrorism related offences in Italy who found safe haven here. In December 1985, Searchlight reported on yet another inexplicably gutless response by the Conservative government to calls for their deportation.
THE change of regime at the Home Office is not, it appears, to signal any change in policy over the continued presence in Britain of convicted Italian fascist terrorists.
New Home Secretary Douglas Hurd has now replied to Labour Home Affairs spokesman Alf Dubs who asked him if he now intended doing anything to remedy this astonishing state of affairs. Roberto Fiore and other convicted members of a NAR (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei) cell are all living and working in London, and doubling up as ideological advisers to the National Front.
Like Leon Brittan, Mr Hurd maintains the view that it is up to the Italian authorities to reinstitute proceedings for the extradition of the Fiore gang.
Ever persistent, Alf Dubs then wrote to the Italian ambassador asking if they planned to take such steps.
His reply expressed his concern about “the presence of members of Italian right wing organisations in the United Kingdom” but reiterates Brittan’s argument that “the offence committed is not likely to correspond to English law and is not covered by the extradition treaty between the two countries . . . there is no point in renewing extradition proceedings unless we could be assured that a new request would be successful”.
There is still, of course, a simple way of sorting it all out. As we have said often before, the Home Office could take serious note of the impact on the public good of having these terrorists working hand in glove with the NF, stirring up racial hatred and inciting violence, and simply deport them.
Douglas Hurd, just like his predecessor, is fast earning himself a reputation for being soft on right wing terrorism.
