1980
August 2, Bologna
The Bologna Station Massacre
The Attack
On August 2, 1980, at 10:25 am, in the second-class waiting room of Bologna Station crowded with tourists and people leaving or returning from vacation, a time bomb placed in an abandoned suitcase was detonated, causing the collapse of the West Wing of the building. The bomb contained 23 kg of explosives, a mixture of 5 kg of tritolo and T4, known as “Compound B”, enhanced by 18 kg of gelignite (nitroglycerin for civilian use).
The military-grade explosive was placed in a suitcase positioned about 50 centimeters high on a luggage rack under the load-bearing wall of the West Wing, designed to maximize its effect. The blast wave, along with the debris from the explosion, also hit the Adria Express 13534 Ancona-Basel train, which was stationary on the first track, destroying about 30 meters of platform and the taxi stand in front of the building. The explosion resulted in the deaths of 85 people and the injury or mutilation of over 200.
Initial Official Hypotheses
Immediately after the attack, the official position of the Italian government, then led by Francesco Cossiga, based on the initial findings of the State Police, attributed the explosion to accidental causes, specifically to the explosion of an old boiler located in the station basement. However, further investigations and collected testimonies on-site revealed the deliberate nature of the explosion, clearly indicating a terrorist motive, which directed the investigation towards the environment of black terrorism.
Many years later, recalling the boiler hypothesis, magistrate Libero Mancuso stated in a television interview that the misinformation had already begun minutes after the massacre. This was particularly serious because, with the hypothesis of an attack excluded in the early hours, the perpetrators could disappear undisturbed. The newspaper L’Unità, in the edition the day after the massacre, based on an alleged claim by NAR, supported the idea of a neo-fascist motive behind the attack. In fact, there were immediate claims, first by NAR through a phone call originating from a Florentine office of SISMI, then by the Red Brigades, followed by denials by militants of both terrorist groups. These events contributed to creating confusion and diversion.
Two days before the massacre, the investigating judge in Bologna had issued an indictment against Tuscan neo-fascists accused in the Italicus massacre. This circumstance also prompted investigations into the black terrorism milieu. On August 22, a report from DIGOS, containing documents such as the “orders of the day” of Ordine Nuovo and La disintegrazione del sistema by Franco Freda, supported the need to investigate neo-fascist environments.
On August 28, 1980, the Bologna Public Prosecutor’s Office issued 28 arrest warrants against extreme right-wing militants of Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, Terza Posizione, and Movimento Rivoluzionario Popolare. About fifty more were added later. The charges included subversive association, armed gang, and subversion of the democratic order. Based on DIGOS reports, as well as testimonies and statements from detainees, the following were under investigation: Roberto Fiore and Massimo Morsello, Gabriele Adinolfi, Sergio Calore, Francesca Mambro, Elio Giallombardo, Amedeo De Francisci, Massimiliano Fachini, Roberto Rinani, Valerio Fioravanti, Claudio Mutti, Mario Corsi, Paolo Pizzonia, Ulderico Sica, Francesco Bianco, Alessandro Pucci, Marcello Iannilli, Paolo Signorelli, Pierluigi Scarano, Francesco Furlotti, Aldo Semerari, Guido Zappavigna, Gianluigi Napoli, Fabio De Felice, and Maurizio Neri. All were released in 1981.
Misdirection and Disinformation
Licio Gelli, the Venerable Master of P2, was convicted for misleading the investigations. He later claimed that the explosion was caused by a cigarette butt that triggered a gas leak explosion.
The magistrates received news and reports suggesting that suspects might be beyond Italy’s borders. This led to the hypothesis of an international conspiracy involving foreign terrorists and Italian neo-fascists in hiding abroad with connections in Italy.
However, this turned out to be a constructed fabrication, using old information and entirely invented news. The misdirection operations were planned and executed by a deviant sector of SISMI, then led by General Giuseppe Santovito, a member of P2, who died in 1984.
On January 13, 1981, in a second-class compartment of the Espresso 514 Taranto-Milan train, a suitcase containing eight cans full of explosives, the same explosive that destroyed the station, a MAB submachine gun, a hunting automatic rifle, and two air tickets Milan-Munich and Milan-Paris were discovered. The discovery was possible following a report from the secret services. The operation, called “Terror on trains,” proved to be a hoax by the deviant group of SISMI, who sought to support the foreign theory, referring to a source that had to remain secret. The Rome Assize Court found that “the source did not exist and the information was false, constructed in the office of Musumeci and Belmonte, with the connivance of Santovito.” In the motivation, the judges wrote that “the reconstruction of the facts, based on documentary and testimonial evidence, and on the statements of the defendants themselves, reveals a staggering plot that objectively misled the investigations into the Bologna massacre. It is appalling that forces of the state apparatus, albeit deviated, could act in this way, not only in violation of the law, but with contempt for the memory of so many innocent victims, the pain of their families, and betraying the expectations of all citizens, that justice be done.”
A false dossier, produced by General Pietro Musumeci, deputy head of SISMI, reported the homicidal intentions of the two international terrorists in relation to other exponents of neo-fascist subversion, all linked to armed spontaneism, without political ties, thus authors and at the same time masterminds of the massacre.
The motivation behind the misdirection was identified as aiming to conceal the strategy of tension or, according to minority theories, to protect Muammar Gaddafi and Libya from possible accusations, as they had become important commercial partners for FIAT and Eni. On the same day as the massacre, an agreement was signed in Valletta in which Italy undertook to protect Malta from Libyan attacks, such as those that would later occur in that area of the Mediterranean.
On July 29, 1985, Pietro Musumeci was sentenced to 9 years in prison for criminal association, Francesco Pazienza to 8 years and 6 months for the same offense (the charge of violating state secrets was covered by amnesty), and Giuseppe Belmonte was sentenced to 7 years and 8 months for criminal association, embezzlement, and private interest in office acts: acquitted with full formula Colonel Secondo D’Eliseo, Captain Valentino Artinghelli, and Adriana Avico, collaborator of Pazienza.
On appeal, on March 14, 1986, the sentences were reduced to 3 years and 11 months for Musumeci, 3 years and 2 months for Pazienza, and 3 years for Belmonte. For all the defendants, the charge of criminal association fell. According to the judges of the Rome Court of Appeal, there was no “Super-SISMI”, but a series of reprehensible activities carried out for profit, which did not fit into any secret organization parallel to military secret services.
Search for the Masterminds
The Association of Relatives of the Victims of the Bologna Massacre on August 2, 1980 has always maintained that, as in other similar massacres, those who placed the bomb were merely the executors of unknown masterminds. The President of the Association, Paolo Bolognesi, stated that these masterminds should be sought within the institutions of the time and groups like P2. He also claims that Licio Gelli gave 10 million dollars to people in the secret services and members of the Gladio organization, before and after August 2, 1980. The Association has always rejected foreign leads, both from extreme left and Arab sources, as well as those involving the secret services of NATO countries, arguing that the massacre was planned by Italian masterminds (people who were “at the heart of the institutions”) to maintain power in an authoritarian manner. Bolognesi asserts that Fioravanti and Mambro deny the massacre (both as an actual attack and as an accident or error), despite admitting to all the other murders, because it was too disgraceful and different from the goals and message of armed struggle against the State (unlike the old neo-fascist terrorism) that the NAR wanted to represent when they started their activities. The NAR would have collaborated not for ideological reasons (as previous extreme right-wing armed organizations had done), but because they were rewarded with a counterpart, in collusion with organized crime and deviant secret structures, of which they acted as mere assassins and the last link in the chain.
Bolognesi himself wrote, with Roberto Scardova, the book Stragi e mandanti. Sono veramente ignoti gli ispiratori dell’eccidio del 2 agosto 1980 alla stazione di Bologna? (2012) in which he hypothesized a single international anti-communist strategy, implemented in Greece with the dictatorship of the Colonels, in Italy with the strategy of tension, including fake warning coups and real