The widow of Aldo Moro, the former Italian prime minister kidnapped and murdered by the leftist Red Brigades in 1978, has died aged 94, media reports said.

Eleonora Moro, who died on Saturday, was buried beside her husband yesterday, the reports said.

In an event that scarred the national psyche, the Red Brigades abducted Aldo Moro on March 16, 1978, killing his five bodyguards.

Nearly two months later, Mr Moro’s body was found in the boot of a car placed halfway between the Rome headquarters of the Christian Democrats and that of the Italian Communist Party, symbolising his killers’ disdain for Moro’s proposed “middle way” associating the two parties.

Eleonora Moro campaigned tirelessly for her husband’s release during his captivity, even persuading then Pope Paul VI to write a letter to the Red Brigades, but to no avail.

She never forgave the Christian Democratic government then led by Giulio Andreotti, now 91, for refusing to negotiate with the Red Brigades, who carried out a number of political assassinations from the late 1960s through 1981.

The couple were married in 1945 and had four children.