Via Fani assault The terrorists had prepared an ambush by parking two cars in via Mario Fani that, once moved, would prevent Moro's cars from escaping. According to the official reconstruction at the subsequent trials, eleven people participated in the assault. Other reconstructions report the presence of ten persons, including a lookout, and others mention up to twenty people taking part in the ambush. Doubts have been cast on the terrorists' declarations, which formed the basis for the official accounts, and about the exact identity of the ambush team's members. The presence of Moro himself in via Fani during the ambush has also been questioned following revelations in the 1990s. According to the findings from the judiciary investigations, eleven people took part in the implementation of the plan. The number and the identity of the actual participants has been questioned several times, and even the confessions of the BR have been contradictory on some points. At 08:45, the BR members took their positions at the end of via Fani, a downhill street in the northern quarter of Rome. Four of them were wearing
Alitalia airline crew uniforms. Since not all team members knew each other, the uniforms were needed to avoid
friendly fire. In the upper part of the road and on the right-hand side,
Mario Moretti was inside a
Fiat 128 displaying a fake diplomatic license plate.
Alvaro Lojacono and
Alessio Casimirri were in another Fiat 128 some meters ahead. On the opposite side of the street, there was a third Fiat 128, with
Barbara Balzerani inside, facing the expected direction from which Moro would arrive. occupied a fourth car, a
Fiat 132, near the crossroads where the street ended. Moro left his house a few minutes before 09:00 in a blue
Fiat 130 driven by . Another
Carabiniere, the marshal , sat beside him. Leonardi was the head of the bodyguard team. The Fiat 130 was followed by a white
Alfetta with the three remaining bodyguards: , , and . At 9:03, an anonymous call to the 1–1–3 emergency service (
Polizia di Stato) declared that there had been a shooting in via Fani. 91 bullets were fired, 45 of which hit the bodyguards, who were all killed. 49 shots came from a single weapon, a
FNAB-43 submachine gun, and 22 from another of the same model. The remaining 20 shots came from other weapons which included a
Beretta M12. Ricci and Leonardi, who were sitting in the front seat of the first car, were killed first. Moro was immediately kidnapped and forced into the Fiat 132, which was next to his car. At the same time, the terrorists shot the other three policemen. The only policeman who was able to shoot back twice was Iozzino; he was immediately hit in the head by Bonisoli. All the guards but Francesco Zizzi, who died in the hospital a few hours later, died at the scene. The blue Fiat 132 was found at 09:40 in via Licinio Calvo with blood stains inside. The other cars used in the ambush were also found in the following days in the same road; according to the declarations of the BR members, the cars had been left in the road that same day. On 16 March, the escort in via Fani was not carrying weapons, which were instead kept in the boot of the cars; Moro's wife
Eleonora Chiavarelli said during the trial that the weapons were in the boot because "these people didn't know how to use weapons because they had never had any shooting practice, they were not used to handling them, so the guns were in the boot. Leonardi always talked about it. 'These people shouldn't have weapons they don't know how to use. They should know how to use them. They should carry them properly. Keep them within reach. The radio should be operational, but it doesn't work.' For months it had been going on like this. Marshal Leonardi and Lance Corporal Ricci did not expect an ambush, because their weapons were placed in the bag and one of the two holsters was even in a plastic liner." Chiavarelli's last statement was disputed by Leonardi's widow, who stated that her husband "recently went around armed because he had noticed that a car was following him." On 6 December 2017, the latest Massacre Commission stated that an armoured car could have been enough to prevent the via Fani attack. The Red Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack in a phone call to
ANSA. At 10:00,
Pietro Ingrao, then-president of Italy's
Chamber of Deputies, stopped the parliamentary session and announced that Moro had been kidnapped. In the election on the same day, the
fourth Andreotti government received a large majority of votes, including those of his traditional enemies, notably the PCI. Initially, the BR focused on managerial staff and right-wing trade unionists from the country's largest firms, such as
Alfa Romeo,
Fiat, and
Sit-Siemens. While the BR described the DC as their main enemy as early as 1975, when its offices began to be destroyed or ransacked, physical violence began in 1977 and escalated in Moro's murder. which had been owned by a BR member for a few years, and that Moro was killed there in an underground parking garage. Months after the kidnapping, that apartment was put under investigation by
UCIGOS, the Italian police's central directorate for political crimes, and was thus abandoned by the Red Brigades. Moro's brother Carlo Alfredo, a judge and author of
Storia di un delitto annunciato, argued that Moro was not detained in via Montalcini but in a seaside location. More evidence was found by geologist David Bressan, who showed that based on certain
microfossils and grains of
igneous rock found on the victim and car, Moro must have been located on an
artificial beach, as opposed to a natural river beach near the delta of the river
Tiber. While the kidnappers later claimed to have tried to mislead the investigators by pouring water and sand onto the victim and into the car, forensic geologists expressed doubt that the killers at the time would have been aware of grains of sand as possible evidence for a crime and would not likely have gone through such effort.
Aldo Moro's letters , who led the crisis committees and was the President of the Italian Republic between 1985 and 1992 During his captivity, Moro wrote 86 letters to the main members of the DC, his family, and to
Pope Paul VI. Some arrived at their addressees, while others that had not been sent were later found in another base of the BR in via Monte Nevoso,
Milan. In the letters, Moro puts forward the possibility of negotiation for his liberation if help from his party's colleagues and of the highest figures of the Italian Republic could be obtained. Some of Moro's letters allegedly contain hidden allusions and hints. In one letter to
Paolo Emilio Taviani sent on 9–10 April and enclosed in the BR's Communication No. 5, he asked: "Is there maybe, behind [the hardline stance towards negotiation] against me, an American or German instruction?" Writer
Leonardo Sciascia suggested that in his letters Moro was including clues about his position, as when he wrote to his wife "I am here in full health" on 27 March to indicate that he was in Rome. In the letter of 8 April, Moro launched a vibrant attack at
Benigno Zaccagnini, national secretary of the DC, at
Francesco Cossiga, then interior minister, as well as on the whole of his party. He wrote: "Of course, I cannot prevent myself from underlining the wickedness of all the Christian Democrats who did not agree with my position ... And Zaccagnini? How can he stay tranquil in his position? And Cossiga could not devise any possible defence? My blood will fall over them." Doubts have been cast over the complete publication of Moro's letters. The
Carabinieri general
Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa (then coordinator of the fight against terrorism in Italy, later killed by the
Sicilian Mafia) found copies of some previously unknown letters in an apartment used by the terrorists in via Monte Nevoso. For undisclosed reasons, the finding was not publicly revealed for years. During the kidnapping, the prevalent view was that Moro did not enjoy complete freedom to write. Despite Moro's wife declaring that she recognized his writing style in them, the letters were considered, if not directly dictated by the terrorists, at least to be inspired or controlled by them. Some experts in an analysis committee formed by Cossiga initially declared that Moro had been subject to
brainwashing. Cossiga later admitted that he had partially written the speech held by Andreotti in which it was said that Moro's letter were to be considered "not morally authentic". That Moro was suffering from
Stockholm syndrome was questioned by the two reports of the Italian Parliament's inquiry about the Moro affair. According to this view, Moro was at the height of his faculties, he was very recognizable, and at some point it was him who was leading the negotiation for his own liberation and salvation. This position was supported by Sciascia, who discussed it in the minority report he signed as a member of the first parliamentary commission and in his book ''L'affaire Moro''. Moro was never tortured by the Red Brigades during the 55 days. In the 1990s,
Indro Montanelli commented severely on the letters written during the kidnapping. He wrote: "Everyone in this world has the right to be afraid. But a statesman (and Moro was the state) can't try to induce the state to a negotiation with terrorists that overall, in the kidnapping of Via Fani, had left on the asphalt five dead between Carabinieri and policemen." He was also scathingly critical of Moro's widow, who subsequently blamed the DC and the Italian political class in general for his fate. In 1982, he wrote:
Communications and negotiations from the 1960s During the 55 days of Moro's detention, the Red Brigades issued nine Communications in which they explained the reasons for the kidnapping. The Communication No. 3 said: The Red Brigades proposed to exchange Moro for imprisoned terrorists (Communication No. 8). They later accepted to exchange him for a single terrorist. Cossiga was notably involved in numerous scandal of Italian history, in many of which like the
Piazza Fontana bombing, he had an active role in sidetracking the investigations. According to
Antonio Mennini, Pope Paul VI had saved
£10 billion to pay a ransom in order to save Moro. Italian politicians were divided into two factions: one favourable to negotiations (
linea del negoziato) that, amongst others, included the secretary of the
Italian Socialist Party (PSI),
Bettino Craxi, and the extra-parliamentary left, Writers, including Moro's brother, underlined how the BR's communication lacked any reference to the possible role of the PCI in the Italian government. This was in spite of the day chosen for the kidnapping being that in which PCI, for the first time since the early years of the
history of the Italian Republic, was going to obtain an active government role in Italy. A letter by Moro to Zaccagnini, in which he was referring to this argument, had to be rewritten. A second point put forward was the premise that Moro's revelations, from most of the communication during his people's trial by the BR, would have been made public. Unlike other people kidnapped by the BR and subjected to same procedure, such as judge , and in spite of the unprecedented repetition of the point, in the case of Moro, this never happened. Much of the material collected by the terrorists, including Moro's letter and personal notes written during his imprisonment, became public only after the discovery of the base in via Monte Nevoso. The terrorists later declared they had destroyed all the material containing references to
Operation Gladio discovered in 1990. Montanelli sided in favour of firmness and against the negotiations from the first day. In 2000, responding to a reader on
Corriere della Sera, he wrote: Among those who supported the hardline, one argument is that it would have been seen as an incentive for more kidnappings and criminal acts as a way to blackmail and extort the state. In the words of , "[t]he day after, the Red Brigades would have kidnapped any Andrea Bianchi and the state would have found itself faced with the alternative: accept the blackmail again or refuse it. If they had accepted it, step by step, the dissolution of the state would have been achieved; if they had not accepted it, it would have been demonstrated, I would say plastically, that in Italy there are citizens of first and second class. And the day after the Red Brigades could have opened a door with the words, almost banking, 'registration to the BR'. And many citizens would have rushed there. In short, in one case or another, the state would have signed its dissolution." Journalist
Ezio Mauro argued that negotiations would have been an error, saying: "The only possible solution would have been — had the state apparatus been more efficient and less polluted — to find his prison and free him. I remain convinced that firmness in dealing with the terrorists was the right choice." For those who opposed the hardline, Moro ultimately suffered from this line, and some saw it as a betrayal. They point to other states, such as Germany and Israel, that in practice do not follow a hardline but are pragmatic, depending on the circumstances and interlocutors. Even these that deny in principle any negotiation and ransom payment by the state circumvented these claims through private insurance companies and contractors, such as the United States. Critics point to the April 1981
kidnapping of Ciro Cirillo, another DC member kidnapped by the BR, where the state negotiated and paid the ransom. The outcome of the Cirillo kidnapping stood in sharp contrast to of Moro. When Moro was abducted by the BR in 1978, the DC-led government immediately took a hardline position: the "state must not bend" on terrorist demands. They refused to negotiate with the BR, while local DC members in Campania made every effort and even negotiated with criminals to release Cirillo, a relatively minor politician in comparison with Moro. Some argued that the PCI and Berlinguer were the ones who should have pushed Craxi's and the PSI line of negotiation to save Moro's life. The PSI politician
Claudio Signorile had apparently convinced Fanfani to negotiate with the BR in order to save Moro. There was a conversation between Signorile and PCI politicians and
Gerardo Chiaromonte, in which they said that "precisely because the DC is expressing itself against Craxi's attempt, your openness is desirable, which would have the effect of improving relations between the PSI and the PCI."
Discovery of the body Communication No. 9 stated: "For what concerns our proposal of an exchange of political prisoners in order to suspend the condemnation and to release Aldo Moro, we can only record the clear refusal from the DC. We thus conclude the battle begun on 16 March, executing the sentence to which Aldo Moro has been condemned." with the participation of Maccari, who was later revealed to be the fourth man. For many years, before Moretti's admission, it was thought that Gallinari was the one to murder Moro. Years later, Maccari admitted his role in the events, and confirmed that it was Moretti the one to shoot Moro. Maccari said: "My thoughts go to Moro's widow and family. I would like to ask their forgiveness but I fear that by doing so I could continue to offend them." Moro's body was found that same day in the
boot of a red
Renault 4 in via Michelangelo Caetani in the historic centre of Rome. The location was mentioned by journalist
Carmine Pecorelli as the residence of opera conductor
Igor Markevitch who, according to some theories, was the alleged instigator of the whole kidnapping or had a leading role, According to the terrorist's declarations made some ten years after the event, Moro was woken up at 06:00 with the excuse that he had to be moved to another secret base. In contradiction to this, Bonisoli said that Moro was told that he had been pardoned and was going to be freed. . A plaque commemorates him. The terrorists put him into a wicker basket and brought him to the parking garage of their base in via Montalcini. They put him into the boot of a red Renault; after covering him with a red sheet, Moretti shot Moro with a 9 mm
Walther PPK and after the weapon jammed, a 7.65 mm
Škorpion vz. 61. The bullets perforated Moro's lungs and killed him. The car with his body was taken to via Caetani where it was parked about one hour after the murder. The common interpretation was that the location was midway between the national seats of DC and of the PCI in Rome to symbolize the end of the
Historic Compromise, the alliance between the DC and the PCI that Moro had sought. In fact, the car was found more towards the river Tiber, near the
ghetto. in order to let him announce the location of the body. This fulfilled a will explicitly communicated by Moro to his kidnappers. At 13:30, a phone call, attributed to Morucci, notified the
Prefecture of Police that Moro's body was in a car in via Caetani. The
autopsy made after the discovery assigned the death to around 09:00 and 10:00 of the same day, in contradiction to the terrorist's declarations. Witnesses declared that the car was in the street as early as 08:00 a.m., while some witnesses declared that they did not see it before 12:30 a.m. Moro was wearing the same grey clothes he had during the kidnapping. The cravat had several blood stains, traces of sand were found in the pockets and socks, and traces of vegetation were also found. Eventually, the terrorists declared that they had intentionally added those traces in order to sidetrack the investigators. In the boot, there were also some of Moro's personal effects, a bracelet and his watch, and some spent cartridges. Moro also had a thigh wound, likely suffered during the initial assault in via Fani. == Subsequent hypotheses, investigations, and trials ==