Alvaro Loiacono was detained by French police as he arrived on a beach in Corsica with his Swiss girlfriend. He was preparing to take a swim.

Loiacono was arrested near his mother's villa in Corsica

He arrived on the Mediterranean island on Thursday for a holiday in a seaside villa owned by his Swiss mother.

French, Swiss and Italian police had been tracking him for months.

Mr Loiacano has already spent nine years in prison for his part in the murder of an Italian judge.

After his release, he became a fugitive from justice and was sentenced in his absence to life imprisonment as a member of the armed group which killed Aldo Moro.

Mystery

Some details of the killing of Moro - one of the seminal events in Italian politics in the last half-century - still remain shrouded in mystery.

Most of the members of the Red Brigades who were active in Italy in the 1970s and early 1980s were convicted, tried and are now serving long jail sentences. But a few fled abroad and managed to escape Italian justice.

Aldo Moro, a leader of Italy's now defunct Christian Democrat Party, was kidnapped in 1978, kept in a secret hideout in Rome and murdered three months later.

He had been on the point of making a political alliance with Italy's powerful Communist Party, which used to be the largest communist party in Western Europe.