2003
2 marzo, Castiglion Fiorentino (Ar)
Emanuele Petri, 48 anni, sovrintendente capo della Polizia Ferroviaria
Petri joined the Police in October 1973 as a rookie guard, attending the State Police School in Trieste. After being initially stationed in Rome, and then in Florence and Arezzo, his residence remained in Tuoro sul Trasimeno, where he married and created his own peaceful family life with his wife Alma. In 1992, he was assigned to the Polfer at the Terontola station.
On March 2, 2003, Superintendent Petri, with his colleagues Bruno Fortunato and Giovanni Di Fronzo, was providing passenger escort duty on a regional train on the Rome-Florence railway line. Shortly after stopping at the Camucia-Cortona station, Petri and his colleagues decided to check the identification of a man and a woman traveling in their train car. Upon showing fake documents to the officers, who noticed the discrepancies, the suspects reacted against them.
The man drew a pistol and aimed it at Superintendent Petri’s neck, ordering the other officers to throw down their weapons. One of the policemen obeyed by throwing his pistol under the train seats, but the man still shot Petri in the throat, killing him instantly, and also shot the last armed policeman, who despite serious injuries, managed to fire back and fatally wound the assailant. The woman attempted to fire her pistol at the last policeman, but the weapon did not function because the safety was still engaged. A struggle ensued, during which the terrorist was subdued. According to the statements of Officer Fortunato:
“Toward the third-fourth car, Di Fronzo and I stopped to identify a person, while Petri had gone ahead and entered a compartment,” Superintendent Bruno Fortunato recounted during the trial. “I raised my eyes and saw Petri coming out of the compartment with documents in hand and starting to make a call with a mobile phone connected to the operational room of the Florence police headquarters. Then I saw a man (Galesi, Editor’s note) approaching and pointing a gun at his throat. Di Fronzo and I approached a few steps, and I said to him ‘what are you doing, drop that gun.’ Instead, he shouted at us something like ‘give me the guns, hand them over to her’ (Lioce, Editor’s note). I had drawn my pistol from the holster and was hiding it behind the corner of an armchair. She walked past me without looking at me, then I realized she was aiming at the pistol that Di Fronzo had meanwhile thrown to the ground under some seats. When she was just behind me, I felt a pinch in my abdomen (the shot fired by Galesi, Editor’s note). Then I heard a few more shots, but I don’t know how many. Emanuele (Petri, Editor’s note) was on the ground, I raised my pistol and fired. Galesi fell to the ground, stretched out in the corridor. At that point, I heard Di Fronzo telling me ‘Bruno, give me a hand.’ I turned around but I didn’t feel like doing anything else (shooting, Editor’s note). I put the pistol back in the holster and saw the defendant lying on an armchair with a pistol between her legs, clicking and pressing the trigger, a few times, without the shot firing. Di Fronzo was behind her, bent over the back of an armchair, trying to restrain her but unsuccessfully because he couldn’t reach the pistol. I saw the woman trying to rearm the weapon several times and shoot at me. Afterwards, I realized it was the gun that Di Fronzo had thrown under the seats. I ripped the pistol from her hands, gave it to Di Fronzo, and handcuffed her. Then I went forward to check.”
The train then stopped at Castiglion Fiorentino station, where first aid arrived for the injured people, including the assailant Galesi (who died a few hours later in the hospital) and Officer Fortunato, saved through a lengthy surgical operation. Shaken by the tragedy, he never fully recovered and committed suicide on April 9, 2010, in Nettuno, shooting himself in the head.
Initial investigations determined that the two suspects checked by the policemen were terrorists belonging to the New Red Brigades, and from the reconstructions and the material found on the train and in the woman’s bag (documents, floppy disks, and two PDAs), investigators managed to capture all the members of the terrorist organization responsible for the murders of Massimo D’Antona and Marco Biagi, which occurred in 1999 and 2002, respectively.
On the day of his death, Petri was not supposed to be on duty but had requested a shift change to assist a seriously ill former colleague of the Carabinieri.