Word: antiterrorist
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...precisely 11:28 a.m. last Thursday, an unmarked van carrying ten special agents of Italy's Central Operative Security Nucleus, a tough antiterrorist squad known colloquially as the "leatherheads" for the tight-fitting leather hoods worn during special operations, pulled up behind a modern eight-story apartment building in Padua. Police had quietly cordoned off the Via Pindemonte, the normally busy street out front, and shoppers in the supermarket on the ground floor were startled to find themselves locked inside for their own safety. Then the commandos rushed inside the building, carrying machine guns and dressed in blue jeans...
...nighttime raid on the apartment was rejected because streets in the partly commercial area would be too quiet then, and Dozier's captors might notice any unusual activity. At about 10 a.m., 28 police and unmarked cars surrounded the area. Half an hour later, members of the special antiterrorist force took up their positions in the street, ready to intervene in case of trouble. Moments later, the truck carrying the ten leatherheads pulled up behind the building, and the raid...
Four of the five terrorists arrested were taken to an undisclosed location. Ciucci was rushed to a nearby hospital in serious condition after sustaining the karate blow in the hallway. All but Ciucci and Frascella, whose father is a respected Padua doctor, were well known to antiterrorist specialists. Indeed, Savasta and Libera were recently convicted in a Cagliari court and sentenced to prison in absentia for several bank robberies and their involvement in a 1980 Shootout with police. In the apartment, police found large numbers of Red Brigades documents and the two slogan-filled posters that Dozier was forced...
Three days later, Nicola Simone, 41, local deputy head of the special antiterrorist police force that is leading the search for Dozier, was shot three times in the face by an assailant disguised as a postman. As Simone lay critically wounded in a hospital, the Red Brigades claimed responsibility for the shooting. The attack was staged in apparent retaliation for the arrest of two Brigades suspects captured in Rome with an arsenal of machine guns, shotguns and grenades in their car. Police also arrested eleven other suspected left-wing terrorists, including Giovanni Senzani, 42, a Florence University professor...
...least 1,200 carabinieri established roadblocks in the region around Verona. Hundreds of others fanned out through the Northern Italian cities of Padua, Bolzano and Mestre, looking for clues and searching abandoned houses. Meanwhile, six antiterrorist experts from the U.S. Defense Department rushed to the scene. Yet by week's end the biggest manhunt since the 1978 assassination of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro had come up empty. There was still no hint of the whereabouts of Brigadier General James Dozier, 50, the U.S. Army officer held by Italy's terrorist Red Brigades...