Carla Bruni in terrorist extradition row

A nasty little row between France and Italy threatens to spoil the celebrations at the Elysee Palace today to mark Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni’s first wedding anniversary. "We have a quiet life, we have settled in," Sarkozy said in a recent interview with Le Point magazine. "Our families get along... No really, I have nothing to complain about, she is great."

There’s just one thing... Did Carla (left), during a recent trip with her husband to Brazil, use her influence to persuade the Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to block the extradition to Italy of the revolutionary-turned-crime writer Cesare Battisti, who was convicted in absentia of four terrorist killings in the 1980s?

Carla insists she did not – she even went on Italian TV a week ago to deny it - while many Italian journalists and politicians are equally convinced she did. Their reasoning is that Carla has form in this area.

Last October, working in tandem with her older sister, the actress Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, she persuaded Sarkozy not to extradite Marina Petrella, a convicted member of the Red Brigades – the leftist group that wreaked havoc in Italy in the 1970s and 80s. The Bruni sisters persuaded the French President that Petrella was suffering from severe depression and weight loss. Carla Bruni even visited Petrella in jail, and said that the threat to her health had become “intolerable”.

Although Sarkozy had come to office vowing to force the return of convicted Italian terrorists, who had been allowed into France under an amnesty signed by Francois Mitterand in the 1980s, he gave way to his wife.

Many in Italy were outraged and now, with Brazil offering Battisti political asylum and refusing to hand him over, they have put two and two together. Margherita Boniver, an Italian MP, is one of those convinced of Carla’s involvement. "The fact that Carla Bruni [helped] Petrella avoid extradition to Italy is something grave," she told reporters, adding that there appeared to be "a sort of convergence" with the Battisti case. "It's all unprecedented."

Bruni remains adamant that she had nothing to do with blocking the extradition of Battisti, who was a member of the Armed Proletarians for Communism (PAC), a left wing terrorist group operating in Milan in the 1970s. They were responsible for the killings of a police officer, a prison guard, a butcher and a jeweller. During one attack, a victim’s 13-year-old son was shot in the confusion, and is now a paraplegic.

Bruni said on Italian TV: “I would never let myself, I don’t have the ideology, I have never defended Battisti and I’m happy to be able to respond to this question and to tell this to the victims’ friends and family”, she said. But a female French crime novelist, who goes by the pseudonym Fred Vargas, and has been leading the campaign in support of Battisti, says she lobbied Bruni directly about the case.

Whatever the truth, the Italians are furious enough with the Brazilians to have recalled their Ambassador to Brazil. And the Italian Defence Minister, Ignazio La Russa, has called for the cancellation of a friendly football match between Italy and Brazil, due to be played at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium on February 10.