A book that has just been published in Italy claims that the bomb at the Bologna train station was linked to Malta signing a treaty with Italy.
It says: "In the spring of 1980, Italy started to negotiate a treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Malta and the possibility for Eni to drill for oil in the sea around it. Gaddafi became furious when he saw he was losing control over an island that Libya considered strategic. He sent a diplomatic delegation to Rome and called on Italy to ''think twice''.
The Italian government decided to proceed and the signing of the treaty was scheduled for the beginning of August 1980 at Valletta. While Foreign Undersecretary Giuseppe Zamberletti was signing the agreement, at 10:25 am, a bomb exploded at the Bologna train station, killing 85 people and wounding 200 others.
There is an obscure page in the history of Italy's post-war phase that has never been really documented. It is the decade between the 1970s and 1980s during which a war was waged in Italy between terrorists and Middle Eastern secret services with attacks and targeted killings. For the first time, a writer and journalist, Salvatore Lordi, sheds light on those years in the book 'Terra di Nessuno', or no man's land, published by 'Historica', coming out now.
While Italian authorities were focusing on the fight against domestic terror carried out by the Red Brigades, Italian streets, and Rome in particular, were at the center of a war between Palestinians from splinter groups of Abu Nidal and Israeli Mossad agents, anti-Turkish Armenian separatists, rival Lebanese miltias, Libyan, Syrian and Iraqi killers. All of them used Italy as a no man's land on which they could continue to wage the battles inflaming many countries of the Mediterranean.
In the rigorous reconstruction by Lodi, an incredible scenario of attacks and murders is described, in which no guilty part was often found, or those allegedly responsible were soon released by authorities.
''Parallel economic and commercial interests encouraged to ignore crimes that were at times atrocious but did not touch us directly'', explained judge Ferdinando Imposimato in the introduction.
What comes out of Lordi's book is that domestic terrorism ended up being connected to international terror, as shown by the cooperation pact for joint training and to import arms and explosives from Lebanon forged in Italy by the Red Brigades of Mario Moretti and PLO representatives in Paris in 1978, or the generous funding provided by Gaddafi to all European subversive groups.
The chapter on Libya is particularly disquieting. Gaddafi's killers meticulously eliminated the Libyan dissidents who had fled to Italy. The list of their names and addresses had been requested to Italian secret services by the Libyan leader in exchange for the release of a group of Sicilian fishermen who were abducted in Libyan waters in 1979.
Along with the Ustica disaster - a Libyan MiG-23 was found on the Sila mountains on July 22, 1980, 22 days after the DC9 Itavia airliner was downed - and the shade of the Colonel can also be perceived in the Bologna attack. Lordi does not blame anyone. He simply works on facts, recreating the historic context.
After the Bologna bomb Premier Francesco Cossiga immediately spoke about fascist terror as a possible culprit but, in a parliamentary query, Giovanni Spadolini wondered whether a Middle Eastern motive could be behind the attack.