1988
April 16, Forlì
Roberto Ruffilli, 51 years old, university professor – Senator of the Republic for the Christian Democracy.
The Red Brigades – Communist Combatant Party (BR-PCC), on April 16, 1988 (just a few days after the formation of the new government led by De Mita, which Ruffilli had contributed to creating), assassinated Roberto Ruffilli. Shortly after returning to his home in Forlì from a conference in the city, Ruffilli was surprised by the brigatists Stefano Minguzzi and Franco Grilli, who disguised themselves as postal workers and rang the doorbell of his residence under the pretext of delivering a parcel. Once inside, they led him to the living room, where they made him kneel next to the sofa and then killed him with three shots to the back of the head. Ballistic examinations revealed that the same weapon had been used in the murders of the two young militants from the MSI (Italian Social Movement), Franco Bigonzetti and Francesco Ciavatta, killed on January 7, 1978, in the so-called Acca Larentia Massacre; against the former mayor of Florence Lando Conti in 1986; and against the economist Ezio Tarantelli, killed in Rome in 1985.
Following a phone call to the newspaper La Repubblica on the same day of the assassination, at 10:40 on April 21, a flyer claiming responsibility for the killing was found in a bar on via Torre Argentina in Rome. It began as follows:
“On Saturday, April 16, an armed unit of our organization executed Roberto Ruffilli, […] one of the best political figures of the DC [Christian Democracy], the key man of renewal, the true political brain of the De Mitian project, aimed at opening a new constituent phase, the central pivot of the project to reformulate the rules of the game, within the overall restructuring of the powers and apparatuses of the State. Ruffilli was also the leading figure who, in recent years, guided the Christian Democratic strategy, knowing how to concretely stitch together, through force and mediation, the entire range of political forces around this project, including institutional oppositions.
Signed: Red Brigades for the establishment of the Communist Combatant Party”
On May 7, his will was found. Half of his savings went to the Catholic University of Milan, where he had graduated, to establish scholarships for young researchers in the field of historical and religious sciences, and the other half to his parish. His papers and books went to the then newly established Faculty of Political Science at the University of Bologna, Forlì campus, and are kept at the Central Library Roberto Ruffilli.
The assassins were sentenced to life imprisonment.