Giuseppe Pinelli

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Giuseppe "Pino" Pinelli (1928-1969) was an Italian railway worker and anarchist activist. He was also the secretary of the Italian branch of the Anarchist Black Cross.

On December 12th, 1969 a bomb went off at the Piazza Fontana in Milan that killed 16 people and injured 84 . Pinelli was picked up, along with other anarchists, for questioning regarding the attack. He was held and interrogated for three days, longer than Italian law specified that people could be held without seeing a judge. Just before midnight on December 15, 1969 Pinelli was seen to fall to his death from a fourth floor window of the Milan police station. Although officially deemed a suicide, the reporter who watched the fall from the street maintained that he was pushed. One of the police officers interrogating Pinelli, Luigi Calabresi, was put under investigation in 1971 for murder but charges were dropped because of lack of evidence.

Pinelli's name has since been cleared, and far-right Ordine Nuovo was accused of the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing (in 2001, three Italian Neo-fascists were convicted, a sentence overturned in March 2004; a fourth defendant, Carlo Di Giglio, was a suspected CIA informant who became a witness for the state and received immunity from prosecution).

Calabresi was later killed by two shots from a revolver outside his home in 1972. In 1988, former Lotta continua member Adriano Sofri was arrested with Ovidio Bompressi and Giorgio Pietrostefani for Calabresi's murder. The charges against them were based on testimony provided, sixteen years later, by an ex-militant who accused himself of having carried out the murder of Calabresi, under order from Adriano Sofri ^[1]. Claiming his innocence, Sofri was finally sentenced 22 years after a long series of trials, in 2000, giving rise to a book from historian Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice.

Pinelli's death is the subject of Dario Fo's play Accidental Death of an Anarchist, although in the original script his name was not mentioned explicitly.