Criminology professor is accused of masterminding massacre

Press, 11 September 1980, Page 15

Criminology professor is accused of masterminding massacre

By

DAVID WILLEY,

“Observer,” London

A university professor, one of Italy’s best known criminologists, is among those have have been accused of masterminding the Bologna railway station massacre on August 2 in which 84 people died. Bologna magistrates ordered the arrest of 28 suspected neo-Fascists, including Professor Aldo Semerari, who holds the Chair of Criminal Anthropology at Rome Univer-: sity and is a leading psychiatric consultant to the, criminal courts in Rome. The professor, aged 55, was arrested at his summer holiday residence near Rieti, north of Rome, and taken under heavy police escort to a top security prison. News of his arrest caused a sensation at the criminal courts where he was a well-known figure. His Fascist sympathies were known to friends and colleagues. One magistrate said that Professor Semerari had a cupboard at his home full of relics of Fascist insignia and photographs of Hitler and MussolinL He used to show them sometimes to his dinner guests, who included politicians and high-ranking army officers as well as magistrates and university colleagues. The professor had recently issued proceedings for defamation against a Left-wing period-

ical which’ had accused him of being one of the brains of extreme Rightwing terrorism in Italy. He had free access to prisons in the course of his official duties and had been called in to give psy-

chiatric evidence in almost every important criminal case in Rome in recent years. Among others accused of planning and executing the Bologna railway station massacre — not only Italy’s but also Western Europe’s worst ever act of political terrorism — are a group of young Romans accused of banding together to form a neo-Fascist organisation called New Order, outlawed by the authorities seven years ago.

A teacher of history and philosophy at one of Rome’s leading secondary schools, Paolo Signorelli, was arrested at dawn at his holiday home in the course of the police round-up of suspects which is still going on. Signorelli, aged 42, was one of the founder members of the Nazi-angled New Order in the 1950 s and has already been in prison on charges of reconstituting the' Fascist party, a crime under Italian law. He was arrested last year on a warrant signed by Mario Amati,

the judge murdered by neo-Fascists earlier this year, but was released on bail.

His name had come to the attention of the police after a speech he made at a Fascist-style political meeting in June, 1979, sponsored by two relatively unknown neo-Fas-cist groups called Third Position and Let’s Construct Action. Judge Amati, later shot dead as he was waiting for a bus to go to work, accused Signorelli of “proclaiming anti-democratic and nationalistic policies with the aim of overthrowing the democratic institutions.” A third well-known neo-

Fascist accused of complicity in the Bologna bombing is Claudio Mutti, a teacher of literature from Parma in northern Italy. He is a leading contributor to Fascist publications, a convert to Islam, and a friend and collaborator of Franco Freda, one of Italy’s most notorious neo-Fascists, nbw serving a life sentence for his part in the organisa* tion of a terrorist massacre at a Milan bank in 1969. The Bologna magistrates have made it clear they wish to keep tight control

over the investigations into the bombing in their city after the judicial farce which followed the Milan bank bombing. That case was moved back and forth between Rome, Milan, and Catanzaro in southern Italy for almost 10 years before verdicts and sentences were finally pronounced. The Bologna suspects, including four people who were already in jail when the massacre actually took place, are being interrogated by investigating magistrates who have promised a progress report to the Press soon. — COPYRIGHT, LONDON OBSERVER SERVICE.