Italy remembers victims of deadly terrorist attack.

Italy's president Sergio Mattarella attended a commemoration ceremony in the northern city of Brescia on Tuesday to mark the 50th anniversary of the Piazza della Loggia bombing.

The terrorist attack by far-right militants occurred during an anti-fascist rally in the central Piazza della Loggia on the morning of 28 May 1974, leaving eight people dead and more than 100 injured.

Brescia marked the anniversary on Tuesday with the tolling of bells in Piazza della Loggia at 10.12 - the exact moment of the bombing 50 years ago - eight times to remember each victim.

After a minute of silence, bells rang out eight times in churches across the city.

#Brescia, il Presidente #Mattarella depone una corona di fiori nel 50° anniversario della strage di Piazza della Loggia pic.twitter.com/U8s15phCbG

— Quirinale (@Quirinale) May 28, 2024

Piazza della Loggia bombing

The no-warning bombing occurred in the central Piazza della Loggia during the so-called Anni di Piombo, or Years of Lead, a period of social turmoil and political violence by both far-right and far-left militants in Italy from the late 1960s until the 1980s.

Investigations into the terror attack uncovered links between far-right militants and secret services and resulted in multiple judicial inquiries over subsequent decades, in one of Italy's longest-running terrorism cases.

The first inquiry in 1979 led to the sentencing of a member of Brescia’s far-right movement Ermanno Buzzi who was later killed in prison. However this first sentence was quashed in 1983 and the suspect was exonerated in 1987 by the supreme court of cassation.

A second investigation led to charges against three other far-right activists who were acquitted in 1989 due to insufficient evidence.

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In 2008 five people were ordered to stand trial in the third investigation, including four leading members of the Ordine Nuovo (New Order) neo-fascist militant group and a carabiniere officer.

The defendants were acquitted in 2012 by the appeals court however three years later the court of cassation overturned the verdict for Ordine Nuovo member Carlo Maria Maggi and former intelligence agent Maurizio Tramonte who were sentenced to life in jail.

Their sentence was confirmed in 2017, with Maggi being charged with ordering the bombing and Tramonte charged with helping to organise the attack.

Tramonte escaped to Portugal but was arrested, extradited to Italy and imprisoned. Maggi died under house arrest in 2018 at the age of 84.

Later this week, exactly 50 years after the bombing, two new trials are about to open against other alleged perpetrators, two neo-fascists from Verona who were very young at the time and who are both living abroad - Marco Toffaloni who is now a Swiss citizen and Roberto Zorzi who lives in the US.