SAO PAULO, BRAZIL - Cesare Battisti, an ex-militant awaiting a verdict on whether he should be extradited to his native Italy for murder, started a hunger strike Friday in his Brazilian prison, reports said.

Battisti, who maintains his innocence, announced his refusal to eat in a letter transmitted to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva by a senator, Jose Nery.

"I put my life in the hands of Your Excellency and the Brazilian people," the letter said, according to the website of the newspaper O Globo.

The aim of the hunger strike was "a last desperate act" to prevent his extradition, equivalent to "a death penalty," wrote Battisti, who reinvented himself as a successful crime writer.

"I have always fought for life, but if it means dying, I am ready but not by the hand of my persecutors," the letter said.

Battisti, 54, was granted political asylum in January by Lula's government.

But Brazil's supreme court has effectively ignored that, keeping him in a cell in Brasilia while it decides an extradition demand from Italy, which sentenced him in absentia to life in prison for the murders of four people in the 1970s.

Italy considers Battisti a "terrorist" for his membership in a radical leftwing group that claimed responsibility for violence in that country at the time.

After several delays, the court is poised to deliver its extradition verdict.

A vote probably to be cast next week by the chief judge, Gilmar Mendes, is to break a 4-4 deadlock among his colleagues. Mendes has already said he was leaning towards extradition.

A judgement backing extradition could create a stunning constitutional clash in Brazil, with the court challenging the premise that Lula has the final say in such matters.

The justice ministry has also said an extradition verdict could serve as a warning to 4,183 refugees from 76 countries currently living in Brazil.

After fleeing Italy in 1981, Battisti renounced his militant past and remade himself as an author in France, where he lived in exile for 14 years.

When French laws protecting him and other repentant former foreign militants were changed, Battisti fled again, arriving in Rio de Janeiro in 2004 with a fake passport.

He was arrested in Rio three years later at Italy's request and has been in detention since. -- AFP