Italy was yesterday showing a united front in the wake of the killing of 36-year-old Fabrizio Quattrocchi, the Italian hostage shot in Iraq by Green Falange, the militant Islamic group.
State President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, centre-right government coalition forces and leading centre-left opposition figures were all agreed that, notwithstanding threats to three other Italian hostages currently held by the same group, Italy should not yield to the kidnappers' demand that it withdraw its 3,000-strong military force from Iraq.
In an open letter to the Quattrocchi family, President Ciampi reaffirmed "Italy's determination" to stay the course.
He added: "The barbaric killing which has struck down your son in the fullness of his youth merely reinforces Italy's determination to block the path of hatred and to work for the realisation of peaceful co-existence in Iraq."
Reacting to the killing, the Italian Prime Minister vowed that Mr Quattrocchi's death would not affect Italy's "efforts for peace", adding: "They have destroyed a life, they have not smashed either our values or our efforts for peace."
Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said that Fabrizio Quattrocchi had died "like a hero", telling reporters yesterday that as the gunman's pistol was pointed at his head, Mr Quattrocchi had tried to pull off his hood, shouting at his captors, "now I'll show you how an Italian dies".
The tragic drama of Mr Quattrocchi's killing had been followed on live television, with Foreign Minister Frattini in the studio of popular current affairs programme Door to Door on Wednesday night as the news was breaking.
Although Green Falange delivered a video of the killing to Al Jazeera, the Arab channel declined to air it, saying that it was too "gruesome".
Italian reporters in Baghdad yesterday claimed that the video shows all four Italian captives digging a grave.
At a certain moment, and without any apparent preamble, one of the kidnappers points a pistol to the back of Mr Quattrocchi's neck, shooting him almost immediately.
Mr Quattrocchi, a former soldier in the Italian army, had worked in Italy as a private security guard and nightclub bouncer for a Genoa-based security company called IBSA. He is believed to have been working in Iraq for a US security company.
Although Italian public opinion was overwhelmingly opposed both to the US-led military intervention in Iraq and to the subsequent sending of the Italian contingent, only the extreme left yesterday repeated its calls for an immediate withdrawal of the Italian troops.