The Piazza Fontana bombing (Italian: Strage di Piazza Fontana) was a terrorist attack that occurred on 12 December 1969 when a bomb exploded at the headquarters of Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura (the National Agricultural Bank) in Piazza Fontana (near the Duomo) in Milan, Italy, killing 17 people and wounding 88. The same afternoon, another bomb exploded in a bank in Rome, and another was found unexploded in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The attack was carried out by the neo-fascist paramilitary terrorist group Ordine Nuovo, and possibly undetermined collaborators.
On 25 April 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 Piazza Fontana was not the first, but part of a well-coordinated series of attacks.
Deaths of Pinelli and Calabresi
The Piazza Fontana bombing was initially attributed to Italian anarchists. After over 80 arrests were made, the suspect Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist railway worker, died after falling from the fourth-floor window of the police station where he was being held. 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. Three police officers interrogating Pinelli, including Commissioner Luigi Calabresi, were put under investigation in 1971 for his death, but a later inquiry, which ended on 25 October 1975, concluded that there were no wrongdoings regarding Pinelli's death: public prosecutor Gerardo D'Ambrosio established that his fall had been caused by fainting and losing balance, tired after three days of intense questioning.
Despite Calabresi being exonerated (he was not in the room when Pinelli fell), the far-left organisation Lotta Continua held Calabresi responsible for the death of Pinelli, and in 1972 he was murdered by left-wing militants in revenge. Adriano Sofri and Giorgio Pietrostefani, former leaders of Lotta Continua, were convicted of plotting Calabresi's assassination, while members Ovidio Bompressi and Leonardo Marino were sentenced for carrying it out.
Official investigations and trials
Anarchist Pietro Valpreda was also arrested after a taxi driver, called Cornelio Rolandi, 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.
The far-right neo-fascist organization Ordine Nuovo, founded by Pino Rauti, came under suspicion. On 3 March 1972 Franco Freda, Giovanni Ventura and Rauti were arrested and charged with planning the terrorist attacks of 25 April 1969 at the Trade Fair and Railway Station in Milan, and the 8 and 9 August 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 Fontana bombing, it could not be determined for certain who planned it, nor who carried it out. 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.
Also in 1987, the milanese Guido Salvini reopened the investigation based on new evidence. Martino Siciliano, a member of Ordine Nuovo, decided to cooperate when presented with a taped telephone conversation between Delfo Zorzi and some associates which contained the observation that, "the Siciliano problem could be solved with a 9 calibre gun". Siciliano said that he had been present at a meeting with Zorzi and Carlo Maria Maggi in April 1969, in the Ezzelino bookstore in Padua owned by Giovanni Ventura, when Freda announced the program of the train bombings. Despite a death threat from Pino Rauti, electrician Tullio Fabris testified that he had supplied Freda with primers and timers.
Carlo Digilio, confessed explosives expert and advisor to the Ordine Nuovo in the Veneto was convicted in June 2001, which was subsequently upheld on appeal in March 2004. Digilio displayed instances of memory loss after suffering a stroke in 1995. His subsequent confusion regarding dates and events led to the Court declaring him an unreliable witness.
In a 2004 trial of neo-fascists, 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.
In 1998, Milan judge Guido Salvini indicted U.S. Navy officer David Carrett on charges of political and military espionage for his participation in the Piazza Fontana bombing. Salvini also opened up a case against Sergio Minetto, an Italian official of the U.S.-NATO intelligence network, and "collaboratore di giustizia" Carlo Digilio (Uncle Otto), who served as the CIA coordinator in Northeastern Italy in the sixties and seventies. The newspaper la Repubblica reported that Carlo Rocchi, CIA's man in Milan, was discovered in 1995 searching for information concerning Operation Gladio. The inquiry was also conducted by the Venetian judge Felice Casson who charged the then director of SISMI, Sergio Siracusa, of having paid a sum to the justice collaborator Martino Siciliano, but Siracusa refused to testify. The sum ranged between 50 and 100 millions of the then Italian lira. Salvini charged Casson of violation of the preliminary secret, but the judges of Trieste and Brescia rejected his accusations.
General Gianadelio Maletti, the head of SID (Servizio Informazioni Difesa), and a member of the secret masonic society P2 was found responsible for obstructing the investigation and withholding information during the first trial in Catanzaro. In an effort to protect extreme right-wing groups, Maletti destroyed a report concerning the Padua cell of Ordine Nuovo and arranged for potential witnesses to leave the country. Maletti subsequently emigrated to South Africa.
Captain Antonio Labruna, of SID, was also implicated in aiding and abetting the departure of witnesses Marco Pozzan and Giannettini Guido. Maletti and Labruna were convicted in January 1987.
Several elements brought the investigators to the theory that members of extreme right-wing groups were responsible for the bombings:
The composition of the bombs used in Piazza Fontana was identical to that of the explosives that Ventura hid in a friend's home a few days after the attacks.
The bags where the bombs were hidden had been bought a couple of days before the attacks in a shop in Padua, the city where Freda lived.