21 July 2008

PARIS - An ex-member of Italy's disbanded Red Brigades revolutionary group has all but starved herself and is being fed through a tube in France where she faces extradition for murder, doctors said Sunday.

Marina Petrella, 54, who was sentenced to life by a court in Rome in 1992 for killing a police officer and arrested in France in August 2007, has "given up on life," said the two doctors treating her at a prison hospital near Paris.

A warrant was issued in June for her extradition from France, where she has lived since 1993.

She had also been sentenced by the Italian court for seriously wounding the policeman's driver and was charged with holding a magistrate and of staging another armed attack.

Petrella is "depressive and suicidal," the doctors, Christiane de Beaurepaire and Jean-François Bloch-Laine, said in a letter to AFP.

Bloch-Laine said that she only weighs 39 kilograms from eating very little, but that she did not claim to be staging a hunger strike.

The doctors called for her to be transferred to a specialist treatment centre.

The Red Brigades, a Marxist-Leninist group formed in the 1970s, sought to create a revolutionary state through armed struggle and to separate Italy from the Western alliance.

Its members kidnapped Italy's former Christian Democrat prime minister Aldo Moro and murdered him.

[AFP / Expatica]