MYSTERY CONTINUES to surround the bomb attack last Saturday morning on a school in Brindisi, southern Italy, in which 16-year-old Melissa Bassi was killed and five of her classmates seriously injured.
Investigators have left all lines of enquiry open, ranging from a Mafia operation to Greek anarchic terrorism to the act of an isolated madman.
The dynamics of this bloody attack are clear enough. At 7.42am on Saturday, just as students had alighted from their bus on their way to class in the Francesca Laura Morvillo Falcone technical school, a rudimentary but powerful bomb comprising three gas tanks exploded. It was almost certainly activated remotely. Metal debris was found 600m from the school and windows of adjacent buildings were shattered.
In the immediate aftermath, many observers inevitably tended to suggest organised crime. The fact the school is named after Italy’s most famous Mafia investigator, Giovanni Falcone, killed by the Sicilian Mafia along with his wife Francesca Morvillo in 1992, makes the Mafia connection only logical. In the next few days, there will be commemorative celebrations throughout Italy.
Furthermore, the victim Melissa Bassi had just stepped off a bus from Mesagne, a Puglia-style Corleone 16km (10 miles) from Brindisi, where the criminal organisation Sacra Corona Unita is very powerful. Mesagne is the home town of Pino Rogoli, the man who founded Sacra Corona Unita in prison in 1981. It is home to the group’s No 1, godfather Massimo Pasimeni, arrested two years ago.
On top of that, 16 Sacra Corona Unita operatives were arrested in the Brindisi area just 10 days ago. The basic theory would be the group pulled off Saturday’s killing, by way of reprisal for the arrests and as a show of force.
That theory, however, was partially repudiated yesterday by senior Brindisi investigator Marco Dinapoli, who said: “In terms of probability, we are tending towards excluding any Mafia involvement. It is improbable, even if it cannot be excluded, that the Mafia did this. That leaves us with two possibilities, either a terrorist attack or the isolated gesture of a madman.”
Figures in the Brindisi anti-Mafia unit point out that such an action makes no sense, according to Mafia logic. For years, organisations like the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia, the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria and the Camorra in Campagna have constructed their power basis on local consensus. They make work available, lend money or buy local football teams to work tentacles into a community. Blowing up children outside a school would seem highly counter-productive.
There appears to be no evidence of terrorist involvement, even if the bomb would suggest this was not the work of an amateur.