1974

June 17, Padua
Graziano Giralucci, 30 years old, MSI-DN militant
Giuseppe Mazzola, 60 years old, retired carabiniere

On 17 June 1974, the city center was the scene of a turning point in the brutal history of the Years of Lead, the first act of a drift that would bring the political violence of those years, like a dam breaking, to levels of authentic terror for the next ten. At 9.30 in the morning of that late spring day, five hooded people broke into number 24 of via Zabarella: the five were armed with pistols equipped with silencers, and showed off tactics worthy of a paramilitary commando.
Obviously, the choice of location for such a well-thought-out action was not accidental. Via Zabarella 24 was in fact the city headquarters of the Italian Social Movement, for the fasts of republican history a far-right party headed by Giorgio Almirante, who in those years was seeing his support grow vertically especially among young people… impossible to think, therefore , that a city party headquarters was empty at that time of the morning, especially given the particular political situation. In fact, it wasn’t: that morning, two activists were busy with administration in that office, the sixty-year-old former carabiniere Giuseppe Mazzola and the not yet thirty-year-old Graziano Giralucci, a sales agent who had recently become a father, a rugby player and one of the founders of newborn Cus Padua. Finding themselves in the presence of the two, the members of the commando did not hesitate to press the triggers of their guns. A few minutes later, and the office in via Zabarella was empty, this time for real; only two men on the ground witnessed the blitz, two men who fell without knowing why, on a warm late spring morning.
Public opinion did not have to wait long to find out who was responsible for the attack in Via Zabarella: the following day an anonymous phone call to the Gazzettino headquarters in Padua and two notes claiming responsibility swept away any doubts, if any still remained. It was the Red Brigades who killed, and those of Mazzola and Giralucci were the first two murders carried out by the far-left terrorist organization, the first of a series of no less than 84 crimes that would bloodied the Italian streets until 2003.