The 50 Worst Terrorist Attacks (10 page)

The kidnappers demanded the release of jailed comrades and a suspension of the Turin trial of 15 Red Brigades leaders, including founder Renato Curcio. They also called for the release of Armed Proletarian Nuclei (Nuclei Armati Proletari) members. On March 18, 1978, the group announced a “people's trial” of Moro, who was photographed in front of a Red Brigades flag. Because the government refused to negotiate, the Moro family requested Caritas International, a Roman Catholic relief organization, to act as an intermediary. In one of their nine communiqués, the Red Brigades said they would deal only with the government. On April 15, 1978, the group announced that Moro had been sentenced to death. Three days later, a message claimed that Moro's body could be found in Duchess Lake, a mountain lake 100 miles northeast of Rome. Police, soldiers, firemen, and skin divers found nothing after a three-day search. On March 20, 1978, a newspaper received a photo of Moro in apparently good health, holding the previous day's newspaper. On April 22, 1978, the government allowed a 9:00
A.M
. deadline to pass without granting the terrorists' demands. Two days later, a new terrorist ultimatum called for the release of 13 terrorists. On April 24, 1978, Luis Carlos Zarak, Panama's ambassador, said that his president had offered asylum to the prisoners in return for Moro's safe release.

On May 9, 1978, Moro's bullet-riddled body was found in the trunk of a car parked in downtown Rome. The burgundy Renault R-4 was parked on a small street around the corner from the headquarters of both the Christian Democrats and Communists. Moro's hands and feet were chained, and at least 10 bullets were found in his chest and head. The car was found after police intercepted an anonymous call to one of Moro's secretaries at 1:00
P.M
.

On May 18 and 19, 1978, police discovered three Red Brigades hideouts. One of them was believed to be the printing headquarters of the kidnappers. On September 14, 1978, police in Milan arrested Corrado Alunni,
reputedly the new Red Brigades leader, in connection with the kidnapping and murder. By then, 17 people had been charged, although 11 suspects were still at large. The next day, Marina Zoni, 31, was arrested. On October 3, 1978, Lauro Azzolini, 35, and Antonio Savino, 27, were arrested in a gun battle with police, in which Savino and two police were injured. On April 16, 1979, Italian judiciary officials released new evidence implicating 12 people in the case. Several of them had been imprisoned for the previous nine days. Among them were educators, journalists, professors sympathetic to leftists, and Antonio Negri, professor of political science at Padua University. Ultraleftist Professor Franco Piperno, 36, was arrested in Paris on August 18, 1979, and charged with murder. On September 14, 1979, after giving a press conference denying involvement in the case, Lanfranco Pace, 32, was arrested by Paris police in a hotel. On September 24, 1979, after a gun battle with Rome police, Prospero Gallinari, 28, believed to have driven the car with diplomatic plates that blocked Moro's car, was arrested, along with Mara Nanni. Gallinari was hit twice in the legs, twice in the lower abdomen, and once in the left temple.

On January 3, 1980, Rome's public prosecutor asked for trials for several individuals arrested in the Moro case. Alunni, Gallinari, Franco Bonisoli, Azzolini, Teodoro Spadaccini, and Giovanni Lugnini were charged with the kidnapping and killing of Moro and with the slaying of his five-man escort. Adriana Faranda, Valerio Morucci, Mario Moretti, Enrico Triaca, Gabriella Mariani, Antonio Marini, and Barbara Balzerani were accused of crimes connected to the ambush. Toni Negri was believed to have phoned Moro's wife on April 30, 1978, to announce that Moro would be killed. An eyewitness claimed that Negri was at the scene of the ambush and that a woman congratulated him on the attack. Three Red Brigades members were sentenced to life in 1983.

On June 8, 1988, in Lugano, Switzerland, police arrested Alvaro Lojacono, 33, who had been convicted of terrorism in Italy and was believed involved in the Moro kidnapping and murder along with Alessio Casimirri, who remained at large. He was tried in 1975 and initially acquitted of murdering a young rightist extremist, but subsequently was found guilty of the charge by a higher court in 1980. He was sentenced to 16 years. He had vanished by the time of his second trial.

On October 9, 1990, construction workers found 421 photocopies of handwritten and typed letters written and signed by Moro hidden inside a window sill. They also found a machine gun, a pistol, and 60 million lire ($50,000) in a Milan apartment previously used by the terrorists as a hideout. Carabinieri had discovered the Milan hideout at 8 Via Montenevoso on October 1, 1978, and arrested nine Red Brigades members. More than 30 letters written by Moro were delivered to his family and leading Italian politicians during the 55-day kidnapping. The money was part of the ransom paid to the Red Brigades for the January 12, 1977, kidnapping of industrialist Pietro Costa.

On November 5, 1995, former prime minister Giulio Andreotti, 76, was indicted in Perugia on charges of complicity in the 1979 murder of journalist Mino Pecorelli. The charge said that he and former trade minister Claudio Vitalone conspired with the Mafia to kill the journalist because they feared he would publish damaging revelations concerning the kidnapping and murder of Moro.

On July 16, 1996, an Italian court sentenced to life Germano Maccari for the kidnapping and murder of Moro. Maccari was convicted of shooting Moro. In 1993, another Brigades member convicted as an accomplice led police to arrest Maccari as the fourth kidnapper.

Twenty years after the kidnapping, the newspaper
Corriere della Sera
hosted a roundtable on the topic that included the former terrorists. Triggerman Moretti said that Moro would have been spared if the government had given “just a signal, the recognition of the existence of political prisoners.” However, former Red Brigadist Anna Braghetti said that the 200 members of the gang were polled and could not justify keeping him alive because the government had refused to compromise.

Overview:
Tens of thousands of attacks were attributed to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its various splinters, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), and various Unionist forces during the decades of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. Most of the attacks were low-level bombings and shootings, and involved attacks against suspected civilian supporters of the government, Protestants, or Catholics (depending upon the group). The Provisional IRA did not limit its operations to small-scale attacks, however, on occasion targeting the senior most level of the British government, and in this instance, the royal family. The successful assassination of Earl Louis Mountbatten caused widespread consternation within the United Kingdom, with the man on the street fearful of his own safety if that of the royals could not be guaranteed. Police and paramilitary operations against the IRA and its adherents increased dramatically in the aftermath of the attack. While as of this writing most of the IRA adherents are dead, in jail, retired, or have given up the fray, on occasion diehards claim a bombing.

Incident:
On August 27, 1979, Earl Louis Mountbatten of Burma, 79, second cousin of Britain's Queen Elizabeth, was killed shortly after noon when a bomb exploded on his 29-foot
Shadow V
, a green and white fishing boat that had just pulled out of Mullaghmore, Ireland, a fishing village in County Sligo near the border. Lord Mountbatten died instantly when 50 pounds of explosives went off. His grandson, Nicholas Knatchbull, 14,
and his friend, Paul Maxwell, 15, also died. The dowager Lady Brabourne, 82, mother-in-law of Lord Mountbatten's daughter, Lady Patricia Brabourne, died of her injuries the next day. Lady Patricia was seriously injured. Her husband, film and television director Lord Brabourne ( John Ulick Knatchbull), and son Timothy, Nicholas's twin, were reported in satisfactory condition at a nearby hospital. The INLA and the IRA claimed credit, the latter saying that the execution was part of a “noble struggle to drive the British intruders out of our native land.”

Two patrolmen in a separate car had accompanied the Earl on the halfmile drive from his home to the mooring, a standard procedure for them. However, they did not regularly inspect his boat or accompany him on it. The local police superintendent told the news media, “It was at his own request that he was not guarded constantly.” Police officials speculated that the bomb may have been planted in his boat, which was left at an unguarded mooring a few yards from a stone jetty, and then set off either by remote control from the nearby hills or by a timing device. The bomb may have been placed in one of the Earl's lobster traps, which then exploded when pulled out of the water. Two skin divers had been reported in the area. Witnesses disagreed as to the speed of the boat and whether the trap was being pulled up at the time of the explosion. This was to have been the last weekend of a three-week trip to Classiebawn Castle where Lord Mountbatten spent part of the summer for the previous three decades.

The Irish Republic offered a £100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrators, while the Ulster Defense Association threatened to “take the law into its own hands” if IRA violence was not stopped. A few hours before the bomb went off at 9:30
A.M
., an Irish police patrol had arrested two individuals who were suspected of being involved. Thomas McMahon, 31, an upholsterer, and Francis McGirl, 24, a farmer, were stopped in their car 80 miles away from Mullaghmore near the town of Granard, County Leitrim, in a routine police inspection. They seemed unusually nervous, and McGirl used a fictitious name and address. Police records indicated that McMahon was an IRA expert in bomb mechanisms and McGirl came from a family of IRA activists. Both had Eire addresses. They were held on charges of IRA membership, but were later released on a technicality. They were immediately rearrested and taken to Dublin's special no-jury criminal court, where they were charged with murder. Traces of nitroglycerin and seawater were found in their clothing. On November 23, 1979, a Dublin court found McMahon guilty and sentenced him to life in prison. The presiding judge refused to allow an appeal. McGirl was found innocent of the slaying, but was charged to stand trial on January 21, 1980, on charges of belonging to the outlawed IRA. Irish police believed seven other men were involved in the murder.

Mountbatten, an uncle of Prince Phillip, was England's leading World War II hero. He had been chief of the British Defense Staff, last viceroy of
India, admiral of the fleet, Allied commander-in-chief in Southeast Asia, and First Sea Lord. Burma, where he had governed, declared a week of mourning.

On August 7, 1998, McMahon, 50, was released from an Irish prison as part of the peace process. He had served 19 years of his life sentence. McMahon has since dissociated himself from the IRA.

Overview:
The overthrow of the Shah by followers of the relatively obscure, elderly, Paris-based Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini caught the Western world by surprise. Iran quickly changed from a pro-U.S. oasis to an unrelentingly hostile base protecting anti-U.S. terrorists. The takeover and subsequent ineffective negotiations were marked each day on television news with headlines of “Iran Hostage Crisis: Day X.” A failed rescue attempt modeled along the lines of the successes of the Israelis and the Germans further added to the American public's perception of President Jimmy Carter's administration as feckless in handling the crisis. The Iranians waited to release the hostages until the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, further taunting Carter until the last possible moment of his presidency, thus ending the 444-day national ordeal.

Incident:
On November 4, 1979, 500 radical students attacked the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, seizing 100 hostages after a two-hour battle in which 14 U.S. Marine guards lobbed tear-gas canisters. The terrorists later picked up Jerry Plotkin, a California electronics businessman, at a Tehran hotel, and brought him to the embassy. The students called for the extradition of the exiled Shah of Iran, who 13 days before traveled to New York to be treated for lymphatic cancer.

The students claimed that they were armed with only 10 pistols, although they later said that they had mined the embassy grounds and had placed explosive charges throughout the buildings. They threatened to kill the hostages and blow up the embassy compound if the United States attempted a military rescue.

There was some question as to who was in charge of the attack and with whom the United States could negotiate. The Bazargan cabinet resigned on November 6, 1979, leaving all formal authority in the Khomeini-led Revolutionary Council. A series of foreign ministers—Ibrahim Yazdi, Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, and Sadegh Ghotzadeh—followed and were frequently defied by those holding the embassy. It appeared that there may have been up to five different groups of students involved—fundamentalist Phalange, Qom theological students, Tehran university students, leftists, and Communists.
ABC News
reported that the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) believed some of the students may have been trained by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Although the students said that they were loyal only to Khomeini, many observers suggested that the PFLP was directing the negotiations.

While the takeover initially appeared to be student-led, the government quickly moved to back the demands of the students. On November 12, 1979, Bani-Sadr upped the ante, saying that Iran demanded U.S. recognition that the Shah is a criminal and must be extradited, the return to Iran of the Shah's fortune, and an end to “American meddling” in Iranian domestic affairs. He announced an oil embargo on the United States at the same time President Carter was announcing that the United States would no longer buy Iranian oil. It was also noted that L. Bruce Laingen, the U.S. chargé, and two other U.S. diplomats were being held at the foreign ministry.