August 1980 Bologna Bombing - Alternative Hypotheses

Alternative Hypotheses

Due to the protracted legal procedures over the years and the numerous proven false leads, there developed a number of assumptions and divergent political interpretations around to the real perpetrators and masterminds of the attack.

• In an annex published in fascicles in 1994 of the right-wing weekly L'Italia Settimanale, entitled "History of the First Republic" it is given a particular interpretation of the massacre, linked with Ustica massacre (of which it is literally defined bis, a repetition) and then compared to the cases of Enrico Mattei and Aldo Moro. Without disputing the court rulings that have recognized the perpetrators, the text is intended to indicate the masterminds. The text continues with:

Italy since the birth of the First Republic was, as everyone knows, a country with limited sovereignty (...) now, when, for immediate issues ( ...) has - rarely - made choices that have been found contrary to the covenants to which I said, it made, as said in a mafia-political-diplomatic terms, a sgarro, a "bad mistake". And like in the mafia when a kid is wrong he ends up in some concrete pillar or is deprived of a relative (commonly called "cross-revenge"), so it is among states: When any country is wrong, one does not declare war, but it sends a "warning", as a bomb exploding in a square, on a train, a ship, etc. etc.

• Between 1999 and 2006, during the sessions of the "Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on terrorism in Italy and on the causes of the failure to identify those responsible for the massacres" (XIII legislature, 1996–2001) and then of the "Commission of Inquiry on the Mitrokhin dossier and the activity of the Italian intelligence (XIV legislature, 2001-2006), new elements have emerged on international terrorist networks and the Italian secret services of the former Soviet bloc and major Arab countries like Syria, Lebanon, Libya, South Yemen and Iraq. With this information it was possible to pick up the threads of a plot hidden for 25 years and discover the key points of a secret agreements with the Palestinian leadership (known as lodo Moro) - the background to the arms trafficking between the PFLP and Italy - the threats to the Italian government for the seizure of missiles and the arrest of the PFLP leader in Italy, Abu Saleh Anzeh, in Ortona - the ties of the terrorist Abu Saleh Anzeh with the internationalist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, alias Carlos - the warning of the Italian antiterrorist secret service three weeks before the massacre, - the failure of the Italian intelligence operations to avoid retaliatory action - the arrive in Italy on 1 August 1980 of Thomas Kram, of a German terrorist group linked to Carlos and the Palestinians, and present in Bologna on the day of the massacre. Faced with this evidence, on 17 November 2005 the Bologna prosecutor opened a case against unknown persons (Dossier 7823/2005 RG).

• According to media reports in 2004, taken up again in 2007 Francesco Cossiga, in a letter addressed to Enzo Fragala, leader of the AN section in the Mitrokhin Committee, suggests a Palestinian involvement (at the hands of George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Separat group of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as "Carlos the Jackal") behind the attack. In addition, in 2008 former President Francesco Cossiga gave an interview to BBC in which it reaffirmed its belief that the massacre would not be attributable to black terrorism, but to an "incident" of Palestinian resistance groups operating in Italy. He declares also being convinced of the innocence of Francesca Mambro and Giuseppe Valerio Fioravanti. The PFLP has always denied responsibility.

• In 2005, from his cell in Paris, the pro-Palestinian terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez Carlos stated that "the Mitrokhin Committee attempts to falsify history" and that "they were the CIA and the Mossad to hit in Bologna", with the intent to warn and punish Italy for its relations of mutual trust with the PLO, who had secretly pledged not to hit Italy in exchange for some protection.

• Following the 2006 arrest of former Argentine Triple A member Rodolfo Almirón, Spanish lawyer José Angel Pérez Nievas declared that it was "probable that Almirón participated — along with Stefano Delle Chiaie and Augusto Cauchi — in the 1980 bombing in Bologna's train station." But the Argentine Supreme Court refused in 1998 to extradite Canchi to Italy.

• In May 2007, the son of Massimo Sparti (thug linked to the banda della Magliana and the main accuser of Fioravanti) declares, "my father in the history of the Bologna process has always lied"

• On August 19, 2011 the prosecutor of Bologna placed under investigation two German terrorists, Thomas Kram and Christa Margot Frohlich, both linked to the group of terrorist Carlos, who would be present in Bologna on the day of the attack, thus following the trail of Palestinian terrorism, never accepted by the president of the family victims Paolo Bolognesi and instead repeatedly revived by Francesco Cossiga.