1979

January 29, Milan
Emilio Alessandrini, 36 years old, Magistrate

It is about 8.30 a.m. on January 29, 1979. Emilio Alessandrini, like every morning, has just left his son Marco at the elementary school in via Colletta. A few meters later, at the intersection of Viale Umbria and Via Muratori, stopped at the traffic lights is reached and hit by a First Line command.

Alessandrini is only 36 years old; a young judge, it will be said later.

He is the first magistrate killed in Milan.

The terrorist group consists of five people; two open fire on the magistrate: eight shots, two in the head. From the proceedings of the trial it will be revealed that that operation, which will mark ‘a turning point’ for the terrorist group had long been planned under the name of ‘Operation Alex’.

The first claim comes by phone to the newspaper “La Repubblica”. Two days later, in the leaflet with which the murder is claimed by the First Line Combatant Communist Organization (Romano Tognini Fire Group “Valerio”), Alessandrini is painted as: “one of the magistrates who has contributed the most in recent years to make the prosecutor’s office of the Republic of Milan efficient” and as “… one of the central figures that the capitalist command uses ….. as an efficient military and judicial machine and as a control of social and proletarian behaviors on which to intervene”.

In the claim, Prima Linea specified that Alexandria had been chosen for the commitment he placed in making the judicial structure more modern, and more generally considered why ‘reformist’ judges were more dangerous than ‘conservative’ judges.

The ideologue of the group, Roberto Rosso, to explain the choice of objectives, said: “Some of us choose, in the face of a role that the judiciary assumes, as a fundamental hinge in the reaggregation of institutions and as an institution that deeply knows social reality, for a task of mediation and articulation of the spaces of freedom, of the social spaces that it has assumed by playing an autonomous role that it has within a given legislative framework”.

On January 30, the journalist Walter Tobagi, who will be killed on May 28 of the following year by the far-left terrorist group Brigade XXVIII March, wrote in the Corriere della Sera: ‘It will be for that mild face, as the first of the class that lets us copy the homework, it will be for the rigor he demonstrates in the investigations, Alessandrini is the prototype of the magistrate that everyone can trust; he was a symbolic character, he represented that band of progressive judges, but intransigent, neither talkative hawks, nor surrenderable doves’.