Piazza Fontana bombing

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Piazza Fontana bombing (Italian: strage di Piazza Fontana) identifies the massacre that was a result of a serious terrorist attack occurred on December 12, 1969 when, at 16:37, a bomb exploded at the headquarters of Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura ("National Agrarian Bank") in Piazza Fontana, Milan, Italy. The bomb killed 17 people and wounded other 88. Because of its political importance and seriousness, this massacre took a major historical primary.

In the afternoon of the same day 3 more bombs were exploded in Rome and Milan, and one more was found unexploded.

The massacre of Piazza Fontana marks the beginning of the "strategy of tension" (strategia della tensione). Between the years 1968 and 1974 140 attacks were made - the most dramatic being the Bologna massacre on the morning of August 2, 1980, which proved to be one of the worst events in Italian history.


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[edit] Giuseppe Pinelli and the 1969 arrests

The terrorist act was initially attributed to anarchist bombers. Many arrests were made in the aftermath of the bombings and one of the suspects, Giuseppe Pinelli, died after falling out of the fourth floor window of the police station where he was being held.[1] Anarchist Pietro Valpreda was also arrested. He was recognized by a taxi driver as the suspicious-looking client he had taken to the bank that day, and his alibi was contested. He was jailed three years on preventive detention before being sentenced for the crime, and was finally exonerated sixteen years later.

[edit] Investigations and trials

Far-right terrorist organization Ordine Nuovo, founded by Pino Rauti, was then suspected. On March 3, 1972, Franco Freda, Giovanni Ventura and Pino Rauti were arrested, charged of having planned the terrorist attacks of April 25, 1969 (at the Trade Fair and Railway Station of Milan) and of the 8 and 9 August 1969 bombings (on several trains). The two were later accused of the Piazza Fontana bombing.

Several elements brought the investigators to the neofascist area:

  • The composition of the bombs used in Piazza Fontana was identical to that of the explosives that Ventura, a few days after the attacks, hid in the home of a friend.
  • The timers, coming from a stock of fifty Diehl Junghans timers bought September 22, 1969 by Franco Freda in a Bologna store. Freda later explained that he bought the timers for Mohamed Selin Hamid, an alleged agent of Algeria secret services (whose existence has been denied by Algerian authorities) for the Palestinian resistance. Israel secret services declared that no timer of that kind has ever been used by Palestinians.
  • The bags where the bombs were hidden had been bought in a Padua shop (the same city in which Freda lived), a couple of days before the attacks.

In 1974 the trial was moved from Milan to Catanzaro. On October 4, 1978 the police discovered that Freda had disappeared from the Catanzaro apartment where he was obliged to stay. On February 23, 1979 he was pronounced guilty for the Piazza Fontana bombing and the court sentenced him to life imprisonment. On August 23, 1979 Freda was captured in Costa Rica and extradited to Italy. Several trials followed.

He was sentenced to 15 years of jail for "subversive association" on March 20, 1981. However, Freda was ultimately acquitted on August 1, 1985 for lack of evidence.

In 1989, Stefano Delle Chiaie was arrested in Caracas, Venezuela and rendered to Italy to stand trial for his role in this bombing. Delle Chiaie was eventually acquitted by the Assise Court in Catanzaro in 1989, along with fellow accused Massimiliano Fachini.

In 1990 new investigations on Piazza Fontana were made, and in the latest sentence, due to the declaration of new witnesses, Freda and Ventura were again accused of participation in the terrorist attack. However, as they had been definitively acquitted in 1985, they could not be put under trial again.

In 1998, Guido Salvini, judge in Milan, indicted David Carrett, officer of the U.S. Navy, on charges of political and military espionage and for his participation to the Piazza Fontana bombing, among other events. Judge Guido Salvini also opened up a case against Sergio Minetto, an Italian official for the US-NATO intelligence network, and "collaboratore di giustizia" Carlo Digilio, who was suspected as a CIA informant. La Repubblica underlined that Carlo Rocchi, CIA's man at Milan, was discovered in 1995 searching for information concerning Operation Gladio.[2]

A June 20, 2001 conviction of Italian Neo-fascists Doctor Carlo Maria Maggi, Delfo Zorzi and Giancarlo Rognoni (all members of Ordine Nuovo) was overturned in March 2004. The "collaboratore di giustizia" Carlo Di Giglio received immunity from prosecution in exchange of his information, as this status allows.

A 2000 parliamentary report published by the center-left Olive Tree coalition claimed "that US intelligence agents were informed in advance about several rightwing terrorist bombings, including the December 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan and the Piazza della Loggia bombing in Brescia five years later, but did nothing to alert the Italian authorities or to prevent the attacks from taking place. It also alleged that Pino Rauti (current leader of the MSI Fiamma-Tricolore party), a journalist and founder of the far-right Ordine Nuovo (new order) subversive organisation, received regular funding from a press officer at the US embassy in Rome. 'So even before the "stabilising" plans that Atlantic circles had prepared for Italy became operational through the bombings, one of the leading members of the subversive right was literally in the pay of the American embassy in Rome,' the report says."[3]

Christian Democrat co-founder of Gladio — NATO's stay-behind anticommunist organization in Italy — Paolo Emilio Taviani told investigators that the SID military intelligence service was on the point of sending a senior officer from Rome to Milan to prevent the bombing. However, the SID finally decided to send a different officer, from Padua, in order to put the blame of the bombing on left-wing anarchists. Taviani also declared in an August 2000 interview to Il Secolo XIX newspaper: "It seems to me certain, however, that agents of the CIA were among those who supplied the materials and who muddied the waters of the investigation."[4]

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[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ "1969: Deadly bomb blasts in Italy", BBC News, December 12. Retrieved on April 2006. 
  2. ^ "Strage di Piazza Fontana spunta un agente USA", La Repubblica, February 11, 1998.  ("A US agent appears in the Piazza Fontana bombing")
  3. ^ US 'supported anti-left terror in Italy', The Guardian, June 24, 2000
  4. ^ Paolo Emilio Taviani, obituary by Philip Willan, in The Guardian, June 21, 2001

[edit] External links

Coordinates: 45°27′47″N, 9°11′39″E