FLORENCE, Italy -- Red Brigades terrorists assassinated former Florence Mayor Lando Conti Monday in the first murder attributed to the left-wing gang this year.
Two gunmen in a car fired 15 bullets at Conti, 52, as he was driving through the suburbs of Florence, killing him instantly, police said, citing a witnees to the slaying, another motorist.
The gunmen threw sharpened nails on the highway behind them as they fled after tossing a document signed by the Brigades near Conti's body, police said.
A man who said he represented the Red Brigades claimed responsibility for the killing later in a telephone call to the Milan office of La Repubblica newspaper.
'Here Red Brigades, we claim the killing of Lando Conti,' the man said.
Assistant State Prosecutor Carlo Bellitto said 'the hypothesis of an attack by the Red Brigades seems the most accurate.'
Conti, a Republican, served as Mayor of Florence from March 1984 to September 1985. He was a close friend and colleague of Republican Defense Minister Giovanni Spadolini, also a Florentine.
Some ultra-left groups had criticized Conti because he was a small shareholder in a company making radar equipment for defense purposes.
Spadolini praised Conti Monday as a man who was prepared to stand up to the 'deep political and moral perversion that is terrorism in Italy and the world today.'
Conti's murder was the first killing by the Brigades since the March, 27, 1985, murder of Ezio Tarantelli, an economist and professor at Rome university.
Police were examining a theory that the killing may have been ordered to distract public attention from the opening Monday of the trial of 474 accused Mafia members in Sicily.
