Battisti, 64, was arrested in Bolivia in January, after decades on the run, and extradited to Italy.
Milan’s prosecutor, Alberto Nobili, said Battisti admitted all the charges brought against him in four murder cases while questioned in prison, where he is serving a life sentence.
“It is a very important recognition for the work of the magistrates, a sort of ‘honour of the arms’ for those who have investigated it,” Nobili said.
Nobili, who questioned Battisti at a high-security prison in Sardinia for nine hours over the weekend, said he also admitted that armed revolution was “wrong”.
“I realise the bad I have done and apologise to the families,” Nobili quoted Battisti as saying.
Battisti was jailed in 1979 after being convicted of belonging to the Armed Proletarians for Communism (PAC), a far-left armed terrorist group outlawed in Italy.
He escaped prison in 1981 and spent nearly four decades in hiding.
He lived in France, Mexico, and later Brazil where he was given asylum by the country’s then president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
In January, a Brazilian court revoked his refugee status shortly after the election of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who pledged to have him sent back to Italy.
An international police operation tracked him down in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra and brought him back to Italy in the same month.
Battisti is serving his sentence in a Sardinian prison housing more than 250 convicts, many of them living under the tough “41-bis” prison regime usually applied to Mafia members.
He was sentenced to life for having killed a policeman and a prison guard, for taking part in the murder of a butcher and for helping plan the killing of a jeweller who died in a shootout which left his 14-year-old son in a wheelchair.
Until now, he had admitted to being part of the PAC, but always denied responsibility for any of the murders, describing himself as a political refugee who faced “torture and death” if he returned to Italy.
