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| Thirty years on, terror killing of Italian leader shrouded in mystery |
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Time is GMT + 8 hours
Posted: 14-Mar-2008 18:57 hrs |
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| Former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, after he was kidnapped by far-left Red Brigades movement in 1978. |
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Thirty years after Italy's Red Brigades kidnapped and killed Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro, dark shadows hang over the government's role during his detention as allegations linger that the politician was sacrificed.. At 9:00 a.m. on March 16, 1978, Moro set off for the Chamber of Deputies which was about to inaugurate the new Christian Democratic prime minister, Giulio Andreotti.. Moro, who negotiated the historic but controversial accord under which the communist party supported the Christian Democratic government for the first time, never arrived.. Instead, a commando of the communist Red Brigades stopped his convoy, killed his five bodyguards and whisked him away.. Italy held its breath for the next 55 days, while the far left terror group launched a "people's trial" of Moro and tried to win the freedom of some jailed militants in exchange for his.. Despite repeated calls by Moro for negotiations -- the Red Brigades released nearly 100 of his letters written while in captivity -- the Italian state would not budge.. The Red Brigades executed Moro and left his body in the trunk of a car on May 9.. A new book by Ferdinando Imposimato, one of the judges in charge of the investigation, denounces what he calls the "lies, omissions, black spots and manoeuvres" of the authorities then in power, whom he accuses of intentionally misleading investigators and the police.. "Fifteen years later I came across documents of the crisis unit that handled the affair, and just reading them you see that there was a strategy to get rid of Aldo Moro. And these basic documents were never shown to the judges," Imposimato said in an interview with AFP.. "Aldo Moro was sacrificed for the political class, whose representatives were interested in his disappearance for reasons of state," Imposimato wrote in his book, "Doveva Morire" (He Had to Die), which came out last month.. "There was a voluntary inertia among the authorities, who missed eight chances to free Moro," he charged.. Police rang the bell at a Red Brigades safe house, he wrote, and simply left after no one answered it.. An accomplice clearly linked to the kidnapping, as well as an underground Red Brigades print shop, were not investigated until after Moro's death, according to the book.. "The state wanted Aldo Moro's death," said his widow Eleanora, quoted by Imposimato in the book. "Those who were in various positions of command wanted to eliminate him ... because he was a problem. They were terribly afraid of him because he knew everything about everything.". Rosario Priore, another investigating magistrate in the case, told the weekly Panorama this week: "If we could have had the facts at the time, the result of our investigations would probably have been different.". Moro's daughter Agnese, for her part, told the weekly Oggi: "There's the unanimous feeling that we only knew bits of the truth" of her father's death, which she called "absurd.". "There's not even a biography of my father. No one is doing any research about him because of the lack of access to original documents," she said. "I cannot give up. It's a national obligation to shed all light on the affair." — AFP
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