Aldo Moro is very much forgotten, but the five members of his escort, who died on March 16th, 1978, on Via Fani, are remembered even less.
Who knows their names? Who knows where they are buried?
The whole attack on Via Fani only lasted a few minutes. The five men never stood a chance. They died in a hailstorm of bullets.
Today we know that almost all of the deadly shots were fired from one single weapon. While the other attackers fired wild fusillades as a distraction, one single man seems to have been the precision killer.
Was it really one single member of the Red Brigades? Or a member of the CIA, who verifiably had been present?
He says that he had been in the area privately and merely by chance, having been invited to have lunch with friends.
Until today, the statements of the members of the Red Brigades are full of contradictions and do not fit together.
Oreste Leonardis, Raffaele Iozzino, Giulio Rivera and Domenico Ricci died on location. Raffaele Iozzino had managed to fight his way out of the car and tried to stop the killers with his pistol. He was shot on the street.
Franco Zizzi was still alive when everything was over and the rescue team arrived. He died soon afterwards in the hospital.
“The armed guard was eliminated”, it was stated later in a communiqué of the Red Brigades. These words sealed once and forever what had happened during these cruel minutes on Via Fani: the shift of public perception. Living human beings with hopes and dreams became an anonymous entity, the “armed guard”.
The relatives and friends of the five men mourned in loneliness, overshadowed by the drama of Aldo Moro, who was still imprisoned and wrote letters, fighting for his life.
I had always believed myself to be empathic, to have grasped and shared the suffering in nights full of tears. But only now, on this journey, I begin to truly understand the full dimension of this tragedy.
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