Former Red Brigade member Bertulazzi escapes from house arrest in Buenos Aires by abseiling from the fifth floor

All it took was a harness to enable Leonardo Bertulazzi, 74, a former militant in the Genoa branch of the Red Brigades, to escape from house arrest in Buenos Aires by abseiling from the fifth floor of the building where he lived. Sentenced in Italy to 27 years’ imprisonment for the kidnapping of the industrialist Pietro Costa in 1977 and for membership of an armed gang, Bertulazzi had moved to Argentina over twenty years ago, where he was granted political refugee status. This protection was revoked in August 2024, when he was arrested in Buenos Aires by Interpol officers from the Argentine Federal Police. In July 2025, the Argentine Supreme Court authorised his extradition to Italy, but the proceedings have not yet been concluded.

On Tuesday afternoon, Bertulazzi fled his flat in the San Telmo neighbourhood, abseiling from the fifth-floor balcony using a rope and a harness until he reached an empty plot of land next to the building. From there, he took a final leap of about two metres, landing on the ground. Footage captured by a CCTV camera and published by the Argentine newspaper Infobae shows the former Red Brigade member lying on the ground for a few moments, then getting to his feet and walking away along the street. When officers entered the flat, they found the electronic tag that Bertulazzi had managed to remove, wrapped in pork and with a blood pressure monitor tied around it. The device had not triggered an alarm, even though the former Red Brigade member had already attempted to remove it two weeks earlier. The Argentine government has offered a reward of 20 million pesos for information leading to his capture.