Italy: Secret service link to "anarchist" bomb
01 March 1999
Judge Antonio Lombardi, who is investigating the bomb which exploded in front of the Milan police headquarters in May 1973, killing four people and injuring 45, has dramatically reopened the trial, in spite of Gianfranco Bertoli's insistence that he planted the bomb on his own. The judge has acted on evidence linking Bertoli, the Italian "anarchist" serving a life sentence for the bombing, to the secret services, for whom he worked from 1954 to 1960 and between 1996 and 1971, with the codename "Negro". Lombardi claims that Bertoli's anarchist guise was the final link in a chain which includes members of the armed forces, secret services and neo-fascist extremists.
The trial reopened on April 6 with seven defendants, including five who face a life sentence. Lombardi has accused them of preparing the attack, aimed at Mariano Rumor, then Minister of Interior who had formally disbanded the fascist Ordine Nuevo organisation by decree. The defendants include four neo-fascists from the Veneto region and colonel Amos Spiazzi, who is accused of giving the go-ahead for the bombing. Spiazzi is a leading figure in Italian extreme right politics and was investigated for the aborted "Rosa dei Venti" coup attempt in June 1973. It revealed the existence of a parallel secret service organisation, "the security organisation of the armed forces, which does not have a subversive purpose but aims to protect the institutions of the state against Marxism. This organisation is not the same as SID (Defense Information Service) but in large part coincides with it." The other two defendants, Gian Adelio Maletti and Sandro Romagnoli, were secret service officers at the time, and are now accused of obstructing the law, destroying evidence and suppressing documents concerning the safety of the state.
Lombardi alleges that Bertoli spent the three years before the bombing meeting criminal and extreme right-wing groups in Italy, France and Israel after leaving Italy for Switzerland in 1970, helped by anarchist networks. Lombardi hints at Israeli secret service involvement, claiming Bertoli was in an Israeli kibbutz in 1971, where he trained in the use of firearms and bombs, and to a possible link to police superintendent Calabresi's murder in 1972, alleging that the latter was investigating him. The Milan bombing occurred during a ceremony to commemorate Calabresi.
La Repubblica 6.4.99; Paul Willan "Puppet masters" (Constable) 1991