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Piazza Fontana bombing
Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura building, inside of which the terrorist bombing in Piazza Fontana was carried out on December 12, 1969. (Picture taken on December 12, 2007).
LocationPiazza Fontana, Milan, Italy
DateDecember 12, 1969
16:37 (UTC+1)
TargetBanca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura
Attack type
Mass murder, bombing
WeaponsBomb
Deaths17
Injured88
PerpetratorsCarlo Digilio (member of Ordine Nuovo),[1] other unknown ON's members

The Piazza Fontana Bombing (Italian: Strage di Piazza Fontana) was a terrorist attack that occurred on December 12, 1969, when a bomb exploded at the headquarters of Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura (National Agrarian Bank) in Piazza Fontana (some 200 metres from the Duomo) in Milan, Italy, killing 17 people and wounding 88. The same afternoon, three more bombs were detonated in Rome and Milan, and another was found unexploded.

Piazza Fontana

On April 25, 1969 a bomb exploded at the Fiat booth at a Milan trade fair, in which five people were injured. There was also a bomb discovered at the city's central station. The explosion at Paizza Fortuno was not the first, but part of a well-coordinated series of attacks.[2]

Victims

3
Plaque in memory of the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli.

Deaths of Pinelli and Calabresi

The Piazza Fontana bombing was initially attributed to anarchists. After over 80 arrests were made, suspect Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist railway worker, died after falling from the fourth floor window of the police station where he was being held.[3] Serious discrepancies existed in the police account, which initially maintained that Pinelli had committed suicide by leaping from the window during a routine interrogation session. In 1975 Luigi Calabresi (1937–72), and other police officials were acquitted by the prosecutor (giudice istruttore) Gerardo D'Ambrosio who decided that Pinelli's fall had been caused by his being taken ill and losing his balance.[2]

In 1972 Calabresi was murdered by left-wing militants in revenge. Adriano Sofri and Giorgio Pietrostefani, former leaders of the far-left Lotta Continua, were convicted of organizing the Calabresi's assassination, and members Ovidio Bompressi and Leonardo Marino were sentenced for carrying it out.[4]

Official investigations and trials

Plaque in memory of the 17 victims of the terrorist bombing in Piazza Fontana

Anarchist Pietro Valpreda was also arrested after a taxi driver, called Cornelio Rolandi,[5] identified him as the suspicious-looking client he had taken to the bank that day. After his alibi was judged insufficient, he was held for three years in preventive detention before being sentenced for the crime. In 1987 he was acquitted by the supreme Court of Cassation for lack of evidence.[6]

The far-right Neo-fascist organization Ordine Nuovo, founded by Pino Rauti, came under suspicion. On March 3, 1972, Franco Freda, Giovanni Ventura and Rauti were arrested and charged with planning the terrorist attacks of April 25, 1969 at the Trade Fair and Railway Station in Milan, and the August 8 and August 9, 1969 bombings of several trains, followed by the Piazza Fontana bombing.

In 1987, after a number of trials, the Court of Cassation ruled that despite evidence linking Freda, Ventura, and others to the Piazza Fortana bombing, it could not be determined for certain who planned it, nor who carried it out.[2] The Court confirmed the convictions of Freda and Ventura in relation to the bombs placed in Padua and Milan, for which they each received a sentence of 16 years.[7]

In a 2004 trial of neo-facists the Milan Court of Appeal attributed the Piazza Fontana bombing to Freda and Ventura. However since they had been acquitted in 1987 they could not be retried.[8]

Several elements brought the investigators to the theory that members of extreme right-wing groups were responsible for the bombings[citation needed]:

Main stages of the trial

The supreme Court of Cassation sentenced two members of the Italian secret services – General Gian Adelio Maletti (1 year of jail) and Captain Antonio Labruna (10 months) – to having misled the investigation and acquitted Marshal Gaetano Tanzilli, accused of perjury.[6]

Second trial

Third trial

Stefano Tringali, accused of abetting, benefited from the prescription after being sentenced to one year in prison in the appeal trial.[citation needed]
Digilio was declared an unreliable pentito by the Supreme Court, because he refused a "cathartic confession" in an attempt to "play a role of observer driven by a charge of intelligence", rejecting as "false" his "alleged affiliation with US services". The new track of the CIA, then, was a boomerang as well as the excess of investigative interviews with the Carabinieri, who are "provide data on explosives", then "dumped" by Digilio to the judge Guido Salvini. The Court found that in 1969 the Venetian group of Zorzi and Maggi organized the attacks, but it's not proven their participation in the massacre of December, 12. The Court certifies that Martino Siciliano (another Ordine Nuovo's pentito) attended to the assembly with Zorzi and Maggi in April 1969, in the library Ezzelino of Padua, where Freda announced the program of the train bombings. But since those bombs didn't kill nobody, it's not evidence the involvement of Zorzi and Maggi in the next subversive strategy of Freda and Ventura, and in the other acts of terrorism. The tragic events of December 12, 1969 didn't represent a loose cannon, but were the result of a subversive operation enrolled in a program subversive well settled.[8]


Red Brigades

The Red Brigades conducted its own inquiry into the events. The results of this (and other) inquiries were found in a Red Brigades hideout in Robbiano di Mediglia (Italy) after a firefight with the Italian police (Carabinieri) on October 15, 1974. The records were kept secret until 2000, when the "Commissione Stragi" of the Italian Parliament, investigating terrorism during the presidency of Giovanni Pellegrino, uncovered it.[citation needed]

Political theories of responsibility for the bombing

The bombing was the work of a right wing group, Ordine Nuovo whose aim was to prevent the country falling into the hands of the left -wing by duping the public into believing the bombings were part of a communist insurgency.[3]

A 2000 parliamentary report published by the Olive Tree coalition (an alliance of the Communist Party and the Democratic Party of the Left) claimed that "U.S. intelligence agents were informed in advance about several right-wing 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 organization, received regular funding from a press officer at the U.S. 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.[23]

Paolo Emilio Taviani, the Christian Democrat co-founder of Gladio (NATO's stay-behind anti-Communist organization in Italy), told investigators that the SID military intelligence service was about to send a senior officer from Rome to Milan to prevent the bombing, but decided to send a different officer from Padua in order to put the blame on left-wing anarchists. In an August 2000 interview with Il Secolo XIX newspaper Taviani said that he did not believe the US Central Intelligence Agency was involved in organising the Milan bomb. However he alleged "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."[24]

See also

Further reading

References

  1. ^ Digilio, became Pentito in the 1990s, confessed to have built the bomb exploded in the bank.
  2. ^ a b c Bull, Anna Cento and Cooke, Philip. Ending Terrorism in Italy, Routledge, 2013, ISBN 9781135040802
  3. ^ a b "1969: Deadly bomb blasts in Italy". BBC News. December 12, 1965. Retrieved April 2006. ((cite news)): Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
  4. ^ "Definitive le condanne per Sofri e gli altri", Corriere della Sera, January 23, 1997 Template:It icon.
  5. ^ Indro Montanelli and Mario Cervi, L'Italia degli anni di piombo 1965-1978, Rizzoli, 1991 Template:It icon.
  6. ^ a b c "STRAGE DI PIAZZA FONTANA AZZERATI 17 ANNI DI INDAGINI", la Repubblica, January 28, 1987 Template:It icon.
  7. ^ "Quel tragico 12 dicembre 1969 Chi mise la bomba nella banca?", Stampa Sera, March 20, 1981 Template:It icon.
  8. ^ a b "Freda e Ventura erano colpevoli", Corriere della Sera, June 11, 2005 Template:It icon.
  9. ^ "Si torna a cercare la verità sulla strage di piazza Fontana", La Stampa, May 23, 1980 Template:It icon.
  10. ^ a b c d e f g h Sergio Zavoli, La notte della Repubblica, Nuova Eri, 1992 Template:It icon.
  11. ^ "Quel tragico 12 dicembre 1969 Chi mise la bomba nella banca?", Stampa Sera, March 20, 1981 Template:It icon.
  12. ^ "Tutti fuori, neri e rossi", il Giornale nuovo, March 21, 1981 Template:It icon.
  13. ^ "Catanzaro: anche per Valpreda l'accusa chiederà l'ergastolo", La Stampa, December 13, 1980 Template:It icon.
  14. ^ "UNA STRAGE SENZA COLPEVOLI", la Repubblica, August 2, 1985 Template:It icon.
  15. ^ "ERGASTOLO A FREDA E VENTURA VOLLERO LA STRAGE DI MILANO", la Repubblica, July 12, 1985 Template:It icon.
  16. ^ "PIETRO VALPRESA E' INNOCENTE NON MISE LA BOMBA NELLA BANCA", la Repubblica, July 13, 1985 Template:It icon.
  17. ^ "LE PROVE NON BASTANO PER CONDANNARE MERLINO DUE ANNI A MALETTI", la Repubblica, July 16, 1985 Template:It icon.
  18. ^ "DELLE CHIAIE E' TORNATO LIBERO", la Repubblica, February 21, 1989 Template:It icon.
  19. ^ "Tre ergastoli per la strage di piazza Fontana", Corriere della Sera, July 1, 2001 Template:It icon.
  20. ^ "Processo d' appello per la strage I familiari: «La città ci aiuti»", Corriere della Sera, October 14, 2003 Template:It icon.
  21. ^ "Piazza Fontana, l' appello cancella gli ergastoli", Corriere della Sera, March 13, 2004 Template:It icon.
  22. ^ "Ultima sentenza sulla strage: neofascisti assolti", Corriere della Sera, May 4, 2005 Template:It icon.
  23. ^ US 'supported anti-left terror in Italy', The Guardian, June 24, 2000.
  24. ^ Paolo Emilio Taviani, obituary by Philip Willan, in The Guardian, June 21, 2001.

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