Italian Press Review

The Italian press was unusually united last week, offering near-unanimous support for the government's reported decision to pay a ransom to secure the release of Simona Torretta and Simona Pari, the two hostages held in Baghdad.

One of the few dissenting voices on the ransom has been the conservative daily Il Foglio. The release of the two Simonas "is a cause of joy for them, for their families and for all of us", the paper said on Wednesday. But the ransom "will go towards weapons and recruitment for the war against peace and democracy".

The women, pacifists who worked for the aid agency A Bridge to Baghdad and who opposed the US-led invasion, were then criticised for failing to thank the government of Silvio Berlusconi in their first public appearances. Ms Torretta gave an interview to the centrist Milan daily Corriere della Sera, which angered the rightwing press - she called for the withdrawal of the Italian contingent from Iraq and described the Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, as "a puppet in the hands of the Americans".

After the initial relief, the rightwing press took the gloves off. "I can't take any more of the chatter of the ungrateful and presumptuous Simonas, who forget to thank those fools who bust a gut to bring them home, but remember to praise the bandits of the resistance, the murderers of children, the devout Muslims who were so good as not to decapitate them," said Vittorio Feltri, editor of the Milan daily Libero on Friday.

That same day Il Giornale, owned by Mr Berlusconi's brother Paolo, published a page of readers' letters uniformly critical of the two women. One reader said she had been praying for them but now felt disgusted, while another suggested they were suffering from the Stockholm syndrome, which induces kidnap victims to sympathise with their captors.

Having gained credit for extracting them safely from Iraq, a magnanimous Mr Berlusconi leapt swiftly to their defence. Their words had been twisted, Mr Berlusconi told the Turin daily La Stampa on Saturday. "All I know is that when I went on to the plane that brought them back to Italy they thanked me and one of them even embraced me," he said.