Kidnapping of Aldo Moro
| Kidnapping of Aldo Moro | |
|---|---|
Aldo Moro during his imprisonment
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| Location | Rome, Italy |
| Date | March 16, 1978 – May 9, 1978 |
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Attack type
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| Victim | Aldo Moro and 5 bodyguards |
| Perpetrators | Red Brigades |
The kidnapping of Aldo Moro (Italian: Rapimento di Aldo Moro) was a seminal event in Italian political history.
On the morning of 16 March 1978, the day on which the new cabinet led by Giulio Andreotti was supposed to have undergone a confidence vote in the Italian Parliament, the car of Aldo Moro, former prime minister and then president of Christian Democracy (Italian: Democrazia Cristiana, or DC, Italy's relative majority party at the time), was assaulted by a group of Red Brigades (Italian: Brigate Rosse, or BR) terrorists in Via Fani in Rome. Firing automatic weapons, the terrorists killed Moro's bodyguards, (two Carabinieri in Moro's car and three policemen in the following car) and kidnapped him.
On 9 May 1978 Moro's body was found in the trunk of a Renault 4 in Via Caetani after 55 days of imprisonment, during which Moro was submitted to a political trial by the so-called "people's court" set up by the Brigate Rosse and the Italian government was asked for an exchange of prisoners. Despite the common interpretation, the car location in Via Caetani was not halfway between the locations of the national offices of DC and of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in Rome.
The terrorists had prepared the ambush by parking two cars in Via Mario Fani which, once moved, would prevent Moro's cars from escaping. According to the official reconstruction at the subsequent trials, eleven people participated in the assault. However, several doubts have been cast on the terrorists' declarations on which the official accounts were based, and about the exact identity of the ambush team's members. The presence of Moro himself in Via Fani during the ambush has been also questioned after revelations in the 1990s (see Theory of the alternative kidnapping).
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