Former red terrorist Luigi Bergamin is formed, in Udine he conceived the trap for Santoro which ended up under the blows of Battisti

Terrorism in the region came a month after the assassination of Aldo Moro with the killing in via Spalato in Udine

Luigi Bergamin, one of the 3 former Red terrorists fleeing after the wave of arrests in France, presented himself at the courthouse in Paris together with his lawyer to appear. It is learned from investigative sources.

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During the years of lead there was the illusion that Friuli, already battered by the earthquake, was free from terrorism. At least that. The theory that tragically faltered on June 6, 1978, a month after the murder of Aldo Moro in Rome, when a ferocious trap was staged in via Spalato in Udine to kill the commander of the prison guards, Antonio Santoro. An action conceived above all for a sort of revenge by armed proletarians for communism: the firing was Cesare Battisti, locked up in an Italian prison since 2019 after a long hiding abroad, but the ideological and organizational mind was that of Luigi Bergamin, wanted in these hours in France following the operation that triggered the handcuffs for some protagonists of those years.

The killing of Santoro surprised and moved, but it would still take some time to fully understand that Friuli, not being involved in sensational actions, had however been chosen as the rear of what was happening in Veneto or Lombardy. A sort of sanctuary, as said in certain journalistic reconstructions, or a “buen retiro”, where you can reorganize the ranks, hide, manage kidnappings and sorties from a distance. It should be remembered that Friuli at the time was very crowded with so many people from outside, because the great reconstruction work had started in the countries devastated by the earthquake and a road work like the highway was being built. Construction sites sprouted everywhere while the relief phase had already attracted a crowd of volunteers.

In short, it was proposed as a unique crossroads, in which it was easy to lose track while news of attacks and kidnappings arrived everywhere in Italy at an infernal pace.

Then the curtain also rose in Friuli and everything became clearer. At the origin of the awareness there is a precise date, January 28, 1982, when the American general James Lee Dozier, NATO commander for Southern Europe, kidnapped in December in Verona, is released in Padua. At that point the BR organization collapses like a house of cards. In the den, among the jailers, the codroipese Cesare Di Lenardo is also taken. The arrests followed after Antonio Savasta began to speak. And the fateful day for Udine arrives on February 2, 1982 when, in a shooting in Sant’Osvaldo, Gianni Francescutto and Marina Bono are arrested. Both will then decide to collaborate and their penalties will be reduced. Life imprisonment instead for Di Lenardo.

In the same hours in via Roma special departments of the carabinieri arrest Vanni Mulinaris, belonging to the dynasty of pasta, professor and founder of the Hyperion school in Paris, considered the organization headquarters abroad of the Br. Accusations never tried and Mulinaris will then be acquitted. In the same hours, in the attic of two unsuspecting pensioners in Tarcento, the “people’s prison” in which Giuseppe Taliercio, director of the Petrochemical of Marghera was killed. After the brigatist omertà collapsed, there were soon a hundred arrests in the Veneto-Friuli column. Pages now yellowed on a general madness.

Those who have been there – as Giorgio Bocca wrote – have never quite understood why that wave of violence and blood came between us.