Leonardo Bertulazzi, a 74-year-old former member of Italy’s Red Brigades, escaped from house arrest in Buenos Aires on Tuesday by abseiling with a rope and harness from a fifth floor, after leaving his electronic ankle tag on a homemade device that simulated a human leg, to avoid imminent extradition to Italy. Argentine police on Friday arrested a Uruguayan man and a Salvadoran woman, identified as suspected accomplices, as they were about to cross into Uruguay.
According to the Argentine press and El País, Bertulazzi fitted the monitoring tag onto a device that mimicked the temperature, pressure and humidity of a leg, made from a plastic tube, a piece of pork and several electrical devices, so that the Security Ministry’s alerts would not be triggered. He then climbed down the rear façade of the building in the San Telmo neighbourhood where he lived, evading the police officers stationed at the door. A video shows him reaching the street, jumping a gate and dropping to the ground before walking off. The government is offering a reward of 20 million pesos for his capture. His wife, a German doctor, is also missing, according to El País.
The two detainees were intercepted by the Federal Police in Entre Ríos province. According to local media, both were in a messaging group with Bertulazzi in which his extradition had been discussed in the preceding days, and the Uruguayan man had been in frequent contact with him for years.
“My father escaped because he had no choice. We feared that once extradited he would spend the rest of his life in prison, without the right to a new trial,” his daughter, Claudia Bertulazzi, told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, explaining that her father is a mountaineer. His lawyer, Rodolfo Yanzón, called the escape a “desperate decision” and told Página/12 that he had suffered three strokes.
Bertulazzi was convicted in absentia in Italy and sentenced to 27 years in prison for membership of an armed band and for taking part in the kidnapping of shipowner Pietro Costa in 1977. According to the Italian courts, part of the ransom was used to buy the Rome flat where the Red Brigades held former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978 before murdering him. He fled Italy in 1980 and reached Argentina in the early 2000s. Arrested in 2002, he obtained refugee status and lived for two decades in San Telmo, until Javier Milei’s government withdrew his protection and he was arrested in August 2024. The Supreme Court approved his extradition in July 2025, after Italy offered guarantees of a retrial, and his last appeal was rejected on November 3, according to his daughter.