ROME — A bomb exploded Saturday in front of a school in
the southern city of Brindisi, killing a 16-year-old student and wounding at least five others, local
officials said, raising fears of a return to the kind of violence that shook Italy decades ago.
The explosion occurred near a girls’ school
named after Francesca Morvillo, a magistrate who was killed with her husband, Giovanni Falcone, an
anti-Mafia judge, by a Cosa Nostra bomb on May 23, 1992, an event Italy planned to commemorate on its
20th anniversary.
The bomb went off as students were preparing to enter the school on Saturday
morning before classes began. Italian news media reported that the explosive devices consisted of gas
canisters set off by timers, placed by a low wall surrounding the school.
Witnesses described
the panic that followed the explosion as “an inferno,” while television stations broadcast the eerily
silent aftermath, with knapsacks, textbooks and notebooks strewed across the asphalt in front of the
school, pages flapping in the wind.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility, and the
Italian authorities said Saturday afternoon that investigations would examine all avenues, including
possible links to the ’Ndrangheta, the organized crime syndicate rooted in the southern region of
Puglia, and domestic or foreign terrorism.
In recent months, Italy has experienced a level of
economic turmoil that has unsettled people, with some linking the government’s austerity measures to a
rash of suicides. There has also been a rise in violence against tax collection offices — mostly
carried out by indebted and frustrated taxpayers — as well as against other institutions, like the
military and the aerospace group Finmeccanica, which has been singled out by radical groups that
pattern themselves after the domestic terrorists that kept Italy under siege in the 1970s and early
1980s. A senior executive for a Finmeccanica-owned company was shot in the leg on May 7, and the
group’s chief executive received a written death threat recently.
On Thursday, the government
announced that it would redeploy the nearly 25,000 police officers and soldiers that currently protect
more than 14,000 potential targets and 550 people, after analyzing the recent spate of attacks
throughout the country.
Some commentators on Saturday noted that the school bombing occurred as
runoff elections are being held in several cities, though not in Brindisi, a signal, perhaps, to the
country’s political elite.
Since November, Italy has been governed by a caretaker government of
technocrats, led by Prime Minister Mario Monti, a respected economist called in to stave off financial
disaster caused by the fallout from the euro zone crisis. Although Mr. Monti has broad bipartisan
support in Parliament, that is more a function of the need to assure financial markets that Italy is
getting its economy in order, rather than any real political conviction.
Several lawmakers on
Saturday spoke of the bombing as an attack on the state. “We must all be united in the face of this
massacre, this attack on institutions,” Antonio Di Pietro, a politician with the Italy of Values Party,
told the ANSA news agency. “Either we immediately stem this terrorist phase, or our country is destined
for a civil war.”
Interior Minister Annamaria Cancellieri said Saturday that she had been struck
by the fact that the school, which specializes in fashion and tourism courses, had been named after the
judge and his wife killed by the Sicilian Mafia 20 years ago, but she said in an interview with Italian
Sky News that this form of attack “was not usual for the Mafia.”
In 1993, Cosa Nostra planted
bombs in Rome, Milan and Florence, killing some civilians, but more typically the Mafia kills people
that get in the way of its business, as Judge Falcone did.
Condemnation of the attacks was
immediate and widespread. President Giorgio Napolitano spoke of a “barbarous attack” and called on the
government to be vigilant and firm to root out “subversive violence.”
The explosives went off
just before 8 a.m., next to a group of girls. One, Melissa Bassi, 16, was killed by the blast, and
another was seriously wounded. Four others also suffered injuries.
Remembering the violence of
the so-called Years of Lead, a period of social and political turmoil marked by dozens of acts of
terrorism carried out by left-wing and right-wing radicals, Italians took to the streets on Saturday in
impromptu demonstrations and held sit-ins in many cities. Sporting events stopped for a minute of
silence, and an all-night museum jamboree in Rome, which usually draws tens of thousands of visitors,
was canceled.
Speaking on the state broadcaster RAI radio, Bishop Rocco Talucci of Brindisi said
he was both anguished and angry. “This is not just an offense to life, but especially to young innocent
lives” in a city struggling to distance itself from local organized crime, he said.
Speaking to
those who carried out the attack, the bishop urged them to stop. “Because we have to build, not
destroy,” he said.