The former Italian hostage who saw her rescuer shot dead at a US checkpoint in Baghdad said yesterday they might have been targeted because of US objections to Italy’s policy of negotiating with kidnappers. Giuliana Sgrena, a reporter for the far-left daily Il Manifesto, was wounded as bullets ripped into the car taking her to Baghdad airport to be flown out of Iraq. In a vivid account, written for her newspaper, she described how Nicola Calipari, the international operations chief of Italy’s military intelligence service, was shot in the head as he tried to shield her. “I heard his last breath as he died on top of me,” she wrote. Amid a growing sense of anger, disbelief and sorrow in Italy, about 10,000 people filed through Rome’s Victor Emmanuel monument yesterday to pay respects to Mr Calipari, whose body lay in state. He will receive a state funeral today. Sgrena flew home late on Saturday in the plane carrying Mr Calipari’s coffin. Italy’s president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, was at the airport and, in an effort to express the mixed sorrow and admiration Italians feel for the dead intelligence chief, he stood for a full two minutes with his hands on the coffin before allowing it to proceed. In her account, Sgrena said she recalled her captors’ last words: “Be careful because the Americans don’t want you to return.” The Italian government has virtually admitted a ransom was paid, with the agriculture minister in Silvio Berlusconi’s rightwing government, Giovanni Alemanno, saying it was “very likely”. He added it was “generally preferable to pay a financial price than the price of a human life or a political price consisting of [submitting to] blackmail by pulling out troops”. An Iraqi MP told Belgian state television on Saturday that a $1m (