Prosecutor murdered during Italian poll

Press, 28 June 1983, Page 10

Prosecutor murdered during Italian poll

NZPA-Reuter Rome Gunmen assassinated Turin’s chief State prosecutor yesterday while Italy was in the middle of voting in a General Election. Bruno Caccia was shot several times as he walked his dog near his home in the Piedmontese regional capital, and died on his way to hospital, said the police. His attackers escaped by car. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but the ambush was in the style of the Red Brigades urban guerrilla group and appeared to fit their known strategy of political destabilisation. The murder happened less than two hours after booths closed at the end&f

an otherwise uneventful first day of voting in the two-day election. It was the second shooting of the election campaign. Last month Leftist urban guerrillas wounded a leading Government labour law adviser in Rome. Interior Ministry officials said that the main feature of the vote was a relatively low turn-out compared with previous elections in 1979. Balloting went without incident on the first day, although a bomb was thrown at a polling booth in the southern town of Lamezia Terme, causing no casualties and little damage. Near Catania, in Sicily, a pistol shot was fired when

the police clashed with angry passengers on a special train which broke down while carrying migrant workers home to vote. On a holiday week-end of brilliant sunshine, and after a lacklustre campaign which few Italians wanted, officials reported that a nation-wide average of 68.8 per cent of the electorate voted, compared with 72 per cent on the first day of polling in the last election four years-ago. Opinion polls published late last week suggested that the vote would return a Parliament dominated, like every other postwar legislature, by the conservative Chrisman Democratic Party.

NZPA Dijon Five people were killed and about a dozen slightly injured when a coach taking British tourists home from Spain crashed on the main Lyons-Paris highway at Nitry, 90km north of Dijon. The police said that the coach, on its way to Beauvais airport, northern France, was travelling at about 90km/h when it ran into a severe thunderstorm. The coach ploughed into a metal security barrier running along the centre of the highway, then crashed on to its side. A car and a second coach, transporting French schoolchildren, slammed into the wreck, but there were no casualties in the two following vehicles. The injured were taken to nearby hospitals at Auxerre and Avalion.