Giuseppe Pinelli
Giuseppe "Pino" Pinelli (1928-1969) was an Italian railway worker and anarchist activist. He was also the secretary of the Italian branch of the
Anarchist Black Cross.
On
December 12th,
1969 a bomb went off at the
Piazza Fontana in
Milan that killed 16 people and injured 84 . Pinelli was picked up, along with other
anarchists, for questioning regarding the attack. He was held and interrogated for three days, longer than Italian law specified that people could be held without seeing a judge. Just before midnight on
December 15,
1969 Pinelli was seen to fall to his death from a fourth floor window of the Milan police station. Although officially deemed a
suicide, the reporter who watched the fall from the street maintained that he was pushed. One of the police officers interrogating Pinelli, Luigi Calabresi, was put under investigation in
1971 for murder but charges were dropped because of lack of evidence.
Pinelli's name has since been cleared, and far-right
Ordine Nuovo was accused of the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing (in 2001, three Italian Neo-fascists were convicted, a sentence overturned in March 2004; a fourth defendant, Carlo Di Giglio, was a suspected CIA informant who became a witness for the state and received immunity from prosecution).
Calabresi was later killed by two shots from a revolver outside his home in
1972. In
1988, former
Lotta continua member
Adriano Sofri was arrested with Ovidio Bompressi and Giorgio Pietrostefani for Calabresi's murder. The charges against them were based on testimony provided, sixteen years later, by an ex-militant who accused himself of having carried out the murder of Calabresi, under order from Adriano Sofri . Claiming his innocence, Sofri was finally sentenced 22 years after a long series of trials, in 2000, giving rise to a book from historian
Carlo Ginzburg,
The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice.
Pinelli's death is the subject of
Dario Fo's play
Accidental Death of an Anarchist, although in the original script his name was not mentioned explicitly.
# Italian justice has used a system of
pentiti ("repented") people to fight against terrorism and mafia.
*
Piazza Fontana bombing*
Strategy of tension*
La ballata del Pinelli (The ballad of Pinelli) - in Italian
*
2001 Conviction of the bombers*
December 13, 2005 ANSA cable (in english)
