'Shoot from the right', an ANSA photo rewrites the Via Fani massacre

As in the story 'The Purloined Letter' by Edgar Allan Poe: the truth is so in plain sight that no one notices it; or wants to notice it. Or like the film 'Blow up' by Michelangelo Antonioni, where the truth can be revealed by the details of a photo. In this case it was taken by ANSA photographer Antonio Ianni on the morning of 16 March 1978 in via Fani a quarter of an hour after the massacre (he was the first to arrive on site): it portrays the body of agent Giulio Rivera lying inside the Alfetta of Aldo Moro's escort; on the front right door of the car, the holes from a dozen bullets are clearly visible. Shot "indisputably by a killer positioned on the pavement opposite to the one where the commando of the four 'airmen' of the Red Brigades was shooting. They have always denied that there was one of them on the right".

So who was it? Roberto Chiodi's hypothesis in his book about to be published 'Spari da right. State Murders' (available on Amazon) is that Gladio was also there on Via Fani that day. The newspapers of the time published a version of the cover image of the book in which the holes are barely or not at all visible, due to problems linked to the printing and transmission mechanisms. And even the official documentation present in parliamentary documents largely reproduces images with such a contrast as to make essential details of the bodywork difficult to read. The author worked on the photo, enlarged it and, he says, "a world opened up to me". How was it possible, he asks, "that no one has ever noticed these black holes, a very visible blast with the door open?". It is one of the many omissions and countless misdirections, he writes, which have characterized the story and which continue today, almost half a century later. Chiodi lines up some of them, in addition to the ANSA photo: evidence of an escape route for the terrorists different from the official one; the Moro kidnapping car left under the home of the Attorney General of the Court of Appeal of Rome Pietro Pascalino, who was the dominus of the investigation into the case; the Digos report which falsifies the place and time of the discovery; crucial witnesses yet never questioned; the statesman's fractured ribs never deepened. Those shots "from the right" are thus not only a ballistic consideration, but an indication of responsibility.

The "geometric power" of the action in Via Fani cannot, in the author's opinion, be just the stuff of Red Brigades. In just a minute and a half, with 91 bullets fired, five agents were eliminated (Oreste Leonardi, Domenico Ricci, Francesco Zizzi, Giulio Rivera and Raffaele Iozzino), Moro was picked up unharmed and the escape plan was implemented to perfection. A military operation that required complicity and high skills. Those of an armed and secret structure like Gladio. In that historic compromise of 1977, he observes, "Moro had to be eliminated and the cruel responsibility placed on the terrorists." And there was a sort of pact between the State and BR who agreed on the "speakable truths", those of the so-called 'Morucci Memorial'. Chiodi is confident that the photo can get the judicial machine moving again, because - he recalls - "the crime of massacre is never time-barred". The lawyers of the five victims asked for the case file to be reopened and appealed to the investigating judge when the prosecutor denied it. The judge gave the parties until the end of the year to find new elements. "The hypothesis of a further shooter on the right side of the Alfetta, if confirmed by an expert opinion on the photographic originals and ballistic findings, would require re-examining fundamental aspects of the reconstruction of the massacre", says the author of the book who explains that he brought the photographic documentation to the attention of the judiciary through the lawyer Luigi Li Gotti, one of the victims' defenders.