Brescia bombers convicted 41 years after attack

 ROME - A series of investigations and inconclusive trials spanning 41 years finally came to a historic close when Carlo Maria Maggi and Maurizio Tramonte were given life sentences for killing eight and injuring 102 other people when they planted a bomb in Piazza della Loggia in Brescia, North Italy, May 28 1974.

 The attack occurred in the morning of that fateful day when an anti-fascist protest organised by trade union members was disrupted by the Veneto branch of the extreme right pro-fascist group Ordine Nuovo (New Order). The terrorists detonated a bomb in a rubbish bin on the square, casting a dark shadow over the northern city that haunted investigators for decades. According to the Court, Maggi was the main instigator of the attack, and Tramonte was a collaborator who also was an informer for the former Italian secret services.

 Maggi had previously been tried for the Milan Piazza Fontana Bombing that occurred in 1969, another attack authored by the Ordine Nuovo , another  bloody chapter of the wave of terrorism that swept Italy in the late 1960s to early 1980s, known as the “Years of Lead”. The two had previously been acquitted in February 2014 by the Court of Appeals regarding the bombing in Brescia. The Supreme Court judges said that the ruling was “unjustifiable and superficial”, and consequently lead to appeals and a retrial, which concluded last Tuesday.

 In the court were a group of lawyers and family members of the dead and injured. Manlio Milani, the president of the association of the victims of the Piazza della Loggia bombings, who had lost his wife that morning 41 years ago, said that the result of the trial has proven that over four decades of investigations and “not giving up” has finally paid off. The families of the dead and injured were in tears upon hearing the verdict.

The July 21 verdict is the first time that the Ordine Nuovo and the secret services responsible have been explicitly found guilty for the bombings. Furthermore, it is the first instance where those trialled have not been acquitted, nor have cheated justice by dying before investigations conclude.

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