1980
January 31, Settimo Torinese (Turin),
Carlo Ala, clerk

On the evening of January 31, 1980, Ala, a fifty-eight-year-old married man with three twenty-year-old daughters, had started his night shift at the entrance guardhouse at Framtek, a spring manufacturing company linked to the Fiat Group, along with his colleague Giovanni Pegorin. A commando of four armed individuals attacked the guardhouse, taking advantage of the entry of workers for the last shift, they stormed into the plant, taking the two guards hostage. A third guard managed to escape. The four assailants immobilized the guards, while two other terrorists entered through the gate, throwing Molotov cocktails towards the building where the infirmary and the methane tanks for the steel smelting furnaces were located. Before fleeing, the terrorists declared themselves “a communist firing squad,” and opened fire, shooting ten shots at the legs of Ala and Pegorin, causing serious injuries to the former, resulting in death from bleeding out while the latter managed to survive. Mario Lutri, the third guard, pulled out his gun and fired some shots at the fleeing car, without effect.
In the following days, the action was claimed by the Territorial Communist Nuclei, a small armed group active in the Turin area near Prima Linea, whose main targets were factories in the area. Investigations following the murder and other actions carried out the previous year led in the summer of 1980 to the arrest of the movement’s leaders Guido Borio, Luciano Del Medico, and Guido Mihalic. Once deprived of its leaders, the movement faded away.
In 1985, the trial against the “Territorial Communist Nuclei” concluded, sentencing 90 convictions for a total of 360 years in prison for various crimes committed between 1978 and 1980 in Turin. Giancarlo Santilli, the fugitive considered responsible for moral complicity in the murder of Carlo Ala as well as for organizing an armed gang, was sentenced to thirty years, Federico Alfieri to 24 years, and Danila Mihalic, who fired the shots that killed the guard, to 9 years, and Luciano Bettini.