Circumstances of His Death
On 12 December 1969 a bomb went off at the Piazza Fontana in Milan that killed 17 people and injured 88. 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 15 December 1969 Pinelli was seen to fall to his death from a fourth floor window of the Milan police station. Three police officers interrogating Pinelli, including Commissioner Luigi Calabresi, were put under investigation in 1971 for his death, but legal proceedings concluded it was due to accidental causes.
Pinelli's name has since been cleared, and the far-right Ordine Nuovo was accused of the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing (in 2001, three 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 leader Adriano Sofri was arrested with Ovidio Bompressi and Giorgio Pietrostefani for Calabresi's murder. The charges against them were based on testimony provided, 16 years later, by Leonardo Marino, an ex-militant who confessed to the murder of Calabresi, under order from Adriano Sofri. Claiming his innocence, Sofri was finally convicted after a highly contentious trial, in 2000.
Read more about this topic: Giuseppe Pinelli
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