Time was running out for Leonardo Bertulazzi. After decades of safe harbor in Argentina, Mr. Bertulazzi, a former member of a far-left militant group that kidnapped and murdered Italy’s prime minister in 1978, faced imminent extradition.
Back in Italy, a 27-year prison sentence for terrorism-related crimes awaited Mr. Bertulazzi, according to Argentina’s defense ministry.
Mr. Bertulazzi, 74, was placed under house arrest. The police were stationed across the street from the fifth-floor apartment he shared with his wife in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital. He’d had three strokes in the past two years, his lawyer said, and he was required to wear an ankle monitor.
None of that seemed to stop Mr. Bertulazzi from planning his escape.
On Tuesday, while much of the law enforcement apparatus of Buenos Aires was focused on the visit by Pope Leo, two police officers checked on Mr. Bertulazzi during a routine shift change, according to an official with knowledge of an investigation into Mr. Bertulazzi’s flight who was not authorized to speak publicly.
But this time, when the officers rang the apartment’s doorbell, nobody answered. Investigators believe Mr. Bertulazzi had escaped between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. that morning.
Mr. Bertulazzi’s ankle monitor still showed he was at the apartment, the official said. A search revealed a metal box holding a mess of wires plugged into an outlet, prompting the officers to call an explosives disposal unit, according to the official.
Argentina’s defense ministry said Mr. Bertulazzi had been charged with possessing explosives in connection with his activities with the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group that in 1978 kidnapped and assassinated Aldo Moro, the prime minister at the time.
After the all-clear, officers opened the box and found the monitor wrapped around a plastic tube, the official said, which had been coated in animal fat to trick moisture sensors and stuffed with a type of heating pad often used for back pain — creating a contraption that approximated a human leg.
At the fifth-floor window, officers found climbing ropes and a harness, the official with knowledge of the investigation said, adding that Mr. Bertulazzi had rappelled down to a second-floor terrace on another property before running across rooftops, crossing through an empty lot and climbing over a gate.
Closed-circuit footage, shared in local media and confirmed by the official, showed a man dressed in dark clothes tumbling over the side of a green metal fence on a cobblestone street. In the footage, the white-haired figure slammed onto the pavement, stood up and took a moment to rest, leaning against a wall and limping around.
His lawyer, who had argued that his client’s health was too poor for him to withstand prison in Italy, said escape was a natural choice for Mr. Bertulazzi. “Given his age and health condition, honestly, I understand him,” said the lawyer, Rodolfo Yanzon.
Days later, Argentine authorities are still searching for Mr. Bertulazzi. The defense ministry has offered a reward of 20 million pesos, or about $13,000, for information that leads to his recapture. If captured, Mr. Yanzon said, Mr. Bertulazzi would most likely be charged with evading justice and jailed pending extradition.
Mr. Bertulazzi was part of the Red Brigades, a Marxist-Leninist paramilitary organization that conducted robberies, assaults and assassinations in the 1970s as part of a campaign to foment revolution in Italy. The group’s most notorious act was kidnapping Prime Minister Moro. The Red Brigades held him for nearly two months before fatally shooting him and leaving his body in a car trunk in Rome.
As a high-ranking member of the Red Brigades, Mr. Bertulazzi helped coordinate that kidnapping and others, Argentina’s national security ministry said in a statement in 2024.
The authorities first arrested Mr. Bertulazzi in Argentina in 2002. He was later released, and within two years he was granted refugee status and protections from extradition. But in 2024, Mr. Bertulazzi was arrested again after the election of the current president, Javier Milei, a right-wing leader who promised tough-on-crime policies.
“This arrest reflects Argentina’s commitment to the values of democracy and the rule of law, and demonstrates to the world its firm resolve not to tolerate unpunished murderers,” the security ministry’s 2024 statement said.
After a lengthy legal battle, courts this month had cleared the way for Mr. Bertulazzi to be extradited, as Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, had requested.
