1962

20 October, Verona
Gaspare Erzen, 58 years old, goods guard

On 20 October 1962, Verona found itself on the front line, an internal front animated by independent terrorists from South Tyrol who placed a bomb in the baggage storage room of the Porta Nuova railway station.

«The terrorists linked to Norbert Burger, leader of the Bavarian cell of the BAS, crossed the Italian border on 19 October 1962 to carry out a TNT raid. The group first went to Verona where they left a suitcase stuffed with 10 kg of dynamite and bottles of oil and petrol mixture at the luggage storage of the railway station, all connected to a clockwork detonator.

After that, the terrorists got back into the car and left for Trento, where, around 8pm, they repeated the same operation at the suitcase depot of the Concilio city station, leaving a bag with 5 kg of TNT and 5 liters of oils and petrol mixed together. Not satisfied, they returned to Bolzano and, around 10pm, they placed a time bomb, contained in a leather bag and made up of 8 kg of explosive, against a wall of the “Galileo Galilei” Industrial Technical Institute.

The bomb deposited at the Scaliger station exploded at 2.32pm on 20 October, that is, in broad daylight. The criminals therefore wanted to be sure of spilling a lot of blood. So it was. The frightening explosion devastated the railway yard and tore Gaspare Erzen, an employee of the porterage company, to pieces, killing him. In addition to the victim, the attack injured 19 other people, of whom three were hospitalized with a guarded prognosis. However, the toll could have been much more serious.

In fact, the explosion completely destroyed the entire room with all the suitcases it contained, the walls were seriously damaged and the steel shelves were bent like twigs. After the explosion, a fire broke out and the fire spread quickly in all directions, while high columns of smoke made the air unbreathable. The glass in all the rooms, even if located tens of meters from the point of the explosion, shattered and was thrown everywhere. An “Alfa Romeo 1900” car, parked outside the baggage storage area, was thrown 20 meters away. Even a house more than 300 meters away from the site of the attack shook as if shaken by an earthquake.

From
L’Adige del 22 ottobre 2020, che riporta l’articolo di Eriprando della Torre di Valsassina apparso su Il Primato nazionale
Ottobre 1962: quando Verona diventò bersaglio degli indipendentisti sudtirolesi e pagò col sangue