the national press agency ANSA, "It's in order that everyone understands that, sooner or later, those who have committed such serious crimes should pay for their faults." First trial and escape Cesare Battisti was arrested and jailed in Italy on 26 February 1979, sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison for participation in an "armed group" ("partecipazione a banda armata"). He was sentenced on the ground of material evidence and testimony provided by two "collaboratori di giustizia" (defendants who testified against their former accomplice) who benefitted from lighter sentences for their testimony. The status of "collaboratore di giustizia", also popularly known as pentito, was established by anti-terrorist legislation enacted during this period. PAC members organised his escape on 4 October 1981, while he was in Frosinone prison. Battisti fled to Paris and then Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico, very shortly afterward. While in Mexico, he founded a literary review, Via Libre, which is still active. He also participated in the creation of the Book Festival of Managua, Nicaragua, and organised the first Graphic Arts Biennal in Mexico. Battisti began to write at the suggestion of Paco Ignacio Taibo II and collaborated with various newspapers. Second trial Pietro Mutti, one of the leaders of the PAC who had been sentenced in absentia for the assassination of the prison guard Santoro, was arrested in 1982. He sought the status of collaboratore di giustizia and his testimony, which helped him reduce his sentence, implicated Battisti and an accomplice in the four assassinations claimed by the PAC. Battisti's trial was thus reopened in 1987, and he was sentenced in absentia in 1988 for two assassinations (Santoro and DIGOS agent Campagna) and complicity in murder in the two others (jeweler Torregiani and butcher Sabbadin). The court sentenced him in 1995, on appeal, to a life-sentence. Two years earlier, the Court of Cassation had quashed, on procedural grounds, the case against Battisti's accomplice, accused by Pietro Mutti. Two of the assassinations occurred on 16 February 1979, one at Milan at 15h, and the other in Mestre, 270 km away from Milan, at 16h50. Battisti was sentenced for materially committing the first assassination, and for planning the second one. Return to France In 1985, the Socialist President of France François Mitterrand had indicated that "leftist Italian activists who were not indicted for violent crimes and had given up terrorist activity would not be extradited to Italy";