At 12:09 p.m. on March 16, 1978, AGI reported a statement by Rome’s Chief Public Prosecutor: a high-yield explosive device had been found in the green Mini used by the commando unit. From that moment on, however, the device appears to have vanished—not from the crime scene, but from the official record.(Italian Version)
On March 16, 1978, only hours after the ambush in Via Fani, Rome’s Chief Public Prosecutor, Vanni De Matteo, personally went to the scene of the massacre and told reporters that a high-yield explosive device had been found in the green Mini used by the commando unit. The AGI news agency picked up and distributed his statement at 12:09 p.m. that same day.
The report did not remain confined to the newswire. Writing in the weekly L’Europeo after gathering the assessments of the bomb-disposal experts who had responded to the scene, Roberto Chiodi stated that, had the device been detonated, it could have caused as many as three hundred casualties. In short, it would have dwarfed the Bologna massacre of August 2, 1980.
No formal retraction of that statement appears anywhere in the judicial or parliamentary record of the case. Yet the report of the explosive device—made not by an anonymous source or a chance witness, but by the head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office—vanishes from the case files, leaving no trace of the process such information would ordinarily have followed: investigation, verification, and disposition.
Revisionist accounts circulating on social media now dismiss the episode as an isolated, baseless alarm raised by De Matteo. No documentary evidence supports that reading: no known record ever refuted the Chief Public Prosecutor’s statement on its merits, or the technical assessments reported by Chiodi. The absence of any formal verification of the report—not its alleged groundlessness, which has never been established—is itself the subject of the request for an investigation.
On the basis of these elements, a filing combining a memorandum, a motion, and a report of a suspected crime was submitted to the Court of Rome and addressed to Preliminary Investigations Judge Francesco Patrone. It asks the court to determine how and when the information about the explosive device disappeared from the scope of the investigation, and whether this may constitute a failure to perform official duties.
For the sake of rigor, this issue must be kept separate from the question of whether the device was actually present and what it consisted of—a substantive matter the investigation must assess on the basis of contemporary sources. Whatever the outcome of that assessment, the historically ascertainable fact is that a public statement by the head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office was either never formally recorded or was not pursued through further investigation.
The Investigating Magistrate: Luciano Infelisi
The investigation into the Via Fani massacre was assigned that same day to Deputy Public Prosecutor Luciano Infelisi, who was subordinate to Vanni De Matteo. The case file must establish what measures Infelisi did—or did not—order in response to the report of the explosive device disclosed by his superior only hours earlier: whether it appears in the official reports or in correspondence with bomb-disposal experts and the forensic police, and at what point, and by what route, the information ceased to appear as the investigation unfolded. The request for an inquiry focuses on this transition—the relationship between the Chief Public Prosecutor’s statement and the measures signed or omitted by the magistrate who inherited responsibility for the investigation—rather than on a broadly dispersed responsibility that, at this stage, cannot be established against an unspecified number of magistrates.
The Testimony Concerning the Cartridge Cases on the Right-Hand Side
This picture is compounded by the testimony of a Carabinieri general, according to whom a magistrate at the scene swept cartridge cases found on the right-hand side of the Fiat 130 into a storm drain—the very side where the official record would later deny that any gunmen had been positioned.
If corroborated, this circumstance would move the matter from a failure to investigate to the active removal of evidence from the crime scene, at a location—the right-hand side of the vehicle—directly relevant to reconstructing the number and positions of the attackers, one of the central issues in the case that has never been definitively resolved.
Given its significance, the source must be formally memorialized—in a written, dated, and signed statement, or through testimony preserved for future use—before it can be treated as evidence. It must also be compared point by point with the crime-scene reports already in the record to determine whether the discovery of cartridge cases on that side was documented and, if so, how many were found.
The two lines of inquiry—De Matteo’s statement about the explosive device and the testimony concerning the removed cartridge cases—remain distinct in the nature of their sources and the extent to which they have been verified. Yet they converge on the same issue: the systematic failure to record, or the later disappearance from the case file, of material evidence reported by qualified sources and potentially decisive in reconstructing how the ambush unfolded.
