Fifty years after the massacre of the Milan Police Headquarters. Mattarella: “The state’s response strengthened democracy”

“Fifty years ago a bomb thrown into the crowd, in front of the entrance to the Milan Police Headquarters, on the occasion of the ceremony in memory of Commissioner Luigi Calabresi, broke the lives of four defenseless people, plunged their families into pain, injured numerous citizens intervened. The intent was to hit the Minister of the Interior, Mariano Rumor, who was present at the police headquarters until a few minutes before the bomb exploded».

The President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella says so in a message released on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre at the Milan Police Headquarters.

It was May 17, 1973 when Gianfranco Bertoli, the mass murderer, killed Felicia Bartolozzi, Gabriella Bortolon, Federico Masarin and Giuseppe Panzino in front of the entrance on via Fatebenefratelli and injured 46 other people. They were in line to enter the courtyard where a bust dedicated to Commissioner Luigi Calabresi, killed a year earlier at the hands of a Lotta Continua militant, would soon be inaugurated. The bomber Bertoli threw a hand grenade into the pile. The cops stopped him immediately. “I am an individualist anarchist and acted alone,” said the then 40-year-old. After thirty-two years of investigations and trials, in the 90s, the truth will emerge. Behind that attack was the neo-fascist group Ordine Nuovo, already responsible for the massacres of Piazza Fontana in Milan and Piazza della Loggia in Brescia.

“The plan – recalls the Head of State – aimed to kill the political exponent who, in the face of subversive threats and a climate of terror, had opposed any form of suspension of democratic guarantees and had proceeded firmly to promote the dissolution of the neo-fascist organization Ordine Nuovo.

For Mattarella, that attack “was a further, tragic stage in that subversive strategy that had begun precisely in Milan with the Piazza Fontana massacre and, for years, continued to shed innocent blood with the aim of destabilizing our young democracy. On this fiftieth anniversary, our first moving thoughts go to the victims and to all those who were forced to carry the heavy burden of mourning and suffering».

«The attack on the state and the blackmail on the democratic forces were defeated and the attempt at an authoritarian breakthrough was unsuccessful – concludes Mattarella – A line that has characterized the path of our democracy in the difficult years marked by terrorist actions of the opposite sign, contributing to make it stronger”