Kidnapper, 74, escapes from house arrest in Argentina by abseiling from balcony

A 74-year-old Italian man who was found guilty of a kidnapping carried out by a far-left militant group in the 1970s has escaped while under house arrest in Argentina and is on the run.

Leonardo Bertulazzi used a harness to abseil down from a fifth-floor balcony in the capital, Buenos Aires.

His escape was not immediately registered because he had tampered with his electronic ankle monitor so that it continued to transmit body temperature measurements even after he had prised it open and absconded.

Bertulazzi already spent decades as a fugitive after he was sentenced in absentia in Italy for the 1977 kidnapping of Italian naval engineer Pietro Costa.

He was awaiting extradition to Italy and was being monitored by the Argentine ministry of security through an ankle tag which registers the wearer's body temperature and movements.

Officials said that they had become suspicious when they noticed that the tag had remained stationary.

When they entered the fifth-floor apartment in the centre of Buenos Aires, Bertulazzi was gone, but the ankle monitor remained.

Wary of Bertulazzi's past with the Marxist guerilla group the Red Brigades and his bomb-making skills, police called in explosives experts in case it had been rigged to detonate, according to Argentine newspaper Clarín.

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