Italy's Red Brigades: Ex-members face extradition from France

"That was his car - and his blood on the driver's seat," she says, pointing to the front page of one of the newspapers she's kept from 17 February 1981: the day Luigi Marangoni, a 43-year-old doctor and head of a Milan hospital, was shot dead by Italy's Marxist guerrilla group, the Red Brigades.

Now, more than four decades on, a court in Paris is to decide whether to extradite to Italy several of its former members who had escaped to France.

"Later, we found messages that said: 'We've killed Luigi Marangoni, a slave of the state'", she adds.

"We didn't understand it at the time, but they were at war with the state.".

The Red Brigades grew out of socialist movements among workers and students, hardening into a violent Marxist militancy in the pursuit of revolution.

The group killed and kidnapped dozens of state officials in the 1970s and '80s - Italy's so-called Years of Lead, during which countless terror attacks by the far-left and far-right produced a bloodbath of instability.

The widespread belief that elements of the Italian - and foreign - secret services were in cahoots with neo-fascist groups fuelled the climate of fear.

The highest-profile victim of the Red Brigades was former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who was held captive for 55 days before his body was found, riddled with bullets.

A wave of arrests and life sentences eventually crushed the group - but about 300 members fled to France, given asylum by the government of President Francois Mitterrand if they renounced violence.

Decades on, France has arrested several former members of the group, who will now face an extradition hearing.

But history is still fought over in Italy, where fascism was not crushed with the death of its dictator Benito Mussolini.

The Red Brigades directly targeted mainstream symbols of the state - judges, prosecutors, the centrist Christian Democratic party - but were further radicalised by attacks by far-right groups, in which they believed the state was complicit.

And some former Red Brigade members, such as Francesco Piccioni, maintain that the ends justified their means.

But he rejects the terrorist label, insisting that the Red Brigades were instead "guerrillas" and that their goal of revolution was impossible without violence.

In Milan, at the spot where Luigi Marangoni was killed in 1981, a plaque commemorates the loss of "a good man." His daughter Francesca, who lost her father at 17, stands beside it with her elderly mother Vanna?