Bologna's Grief

Over a terrorist outrage

Standing shoulder to shoulder in the hot, crowded Cathedral of San Petronio in Bologna last week, they formed a frieze that has become all too familiar to Italians: the country's political leaders attending a memorial service for terrorist victims. This time there was a tragic difference of degree. The funeral was for those who died in the explosion that ripped through the Bologna train station on Aug. 2, killing 79 persons and wounding at least 160.

The worst terrorist attack in Western Europe since World War II, which authorities attribute to neo-Fascist extremists, demonstrably deepened public distrust of Italian officialdom. Outside the cathedral, a crowd of 200,000 jammed the Piazza Maggiore and made their feelings known. Popular President Alessandro Pertini received only token applause, while Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga and other political leaders were greeted with whistles and boos. Only seven of the victims' coffins were lined up before the main altar for the public Mass; most of the bereaved relatives had preferred to bury their dead privately as an act of protest against a state they blamed for failing to check terrorism. In other cities throughout the country, tens of thousands of demonstrators staged protest strikes against the bombing. Concluded the Rome daily La Repubblica: "Never has the gulf between the real country and the legal nation been greater."

At the scene of the colossal blast, which tore a 4-ft. crater in the main waiting room and destroyed one entire side of the station, Bologna's mourners created their own folk shrine to the dead. Bouquets of carnations and gladioli were tossed, some with photographs of victims attached. Lines of young travelers with rucksacks paused thoughtfully on the way to their trains. By week's end vases of flowers could be seen among the plastic-covered bouquets stacked at the scene of the explosion, thus giving an air of permanence to the site. Occasionally a housewife would kneel in prayer against the iron barrier that police had set up around the hole. And in nearby towns and villages, streets were being renamed for "The Martyrs of Bologna."

In their investigation, the police tentatively concluded that the bomb had been composed of a common form of TNT, apparently packed into one or two suitcases. Its timing was obviously calculated to wreak maximum carnage: a Saturday morning, the first rush of the August vacation exodus, when the station was packed with an estimated 10,000 people scurrying for tickets and trains. Shortly after the blast, an anonymous telephone caller claimed that the bomb had been planted by a neo-Fascist group called the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (N.A.R.). One possible motive for the outrage: it had been announced earlier in the day that four right-wing terrorists had been indicted for the 1974 bombing of a train outside Bologna that had claimed twelve lives.

Investigators tended to give credence to the claim that the blast was the work of neoFascists, or so-called black terrorists, because of the mindless nature of the crime. Leftist terrorism tends to strike with selective assassinations, like the kidnap-murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro two years ago, Cossiga himself explained to the senate last week. "Black terrorism prefers the massacre because it promotes panic and impulsive reactions." The worst previous incident of terrorism in Italy, in fact, had been the 1969 bombing of a Milan bank that is widely regarded as the start of political terrorism in Italy and for which rightist extremists were tried and sentenced. The bombing took 16 lives and left 90 injured. In the past three years, the N.A.R. specifically has been blamed for 25 attacks, including the murder in June of Mario Amato, a Rome judge who had been investigating its activities.

As the Bologna investigation intensified last week, an initial arrest was made across the French border in Nice. A suspected N.A.R. member named Marco Affatigato was picked up after Italian authorities received an anonymous tip that the 24-year-old hospital cook had been seen at the Bologna station shortly before the bombing. Affatigato had already been wanted in connection with the jail break of Terrorist Organizer Mario Tuti two years ago. Nevertheless, Italian police said that Affatigato's possible involvement in Bologna was far from certain. Cautioned Chief Investigator Luigi Persico: "Right now it's still a process of eliminating one false lead after another until we find out what happened."

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