Extreme-left terror case in 1980 Bologna bombing shelved

(ANSA) - Bologna, July 31 - Bologna prosecutors on Thursday shelved an inquiry into an alternative lead on the August 2, 1980, Bologna train station bombing that took 85 lives and wounded 200. The case against extreme-left German terrorists, Thomas Kram and Margot Christa Frohlich, was opened in July 2011 and shelved for lack of evidence, prosecutors said.
    Both Kram and Frohlich have denied involvement, although they were in Bologna on the night prior to the bombing, prosecutors said.
    The attack is widely believed to have been the joint work of neo-Fascists, members of the secret services and the subversive right-wing Propaganda-Due (P2) Masonic lodge, which was outlawed in 1982.
    In November 1995, the Supreme Court upheld life sentences for two neo-Fascist terrorists from the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (NAR), Valerio Fioravanti, a former TV child star, and Francesca Mambro, who were convicted of planting the bomb.
    A third NAR member, Luigi Ciavardini, was sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2007 for his role in the bombing.
    Also upheld were lengthy jail terms for the head of the P2 lodge, Licio Gelli, rogue operatives from the SISMI military intelligence service, and middleman Francesco Pazienza, for working to sidetrack investigations into the massacre.
    Fioravanti and his companion Mambro have confessed to a string of murders but have always maintained they had nothing to do with the Bologna bomb.
    The alternative prosecution theory was that Kram and Frohlich, both of whom were in Bologna on the night before the fatal explosion, planted the bomb on behalf of Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal.
    Carlos ordered the attack on behalf of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), prosecutors alleged.
    The president of a group representing the families of victims of the Bologna train station bombing, Paolo Bolognesi, greeted the news with relief.
    "It was about time that investigation was shelved," said Bolognesi, who is convinced that the bomb was planted by Fioravanti, Mambro and Ciavardini. His association has filed many petitions asking prosecutors to find out who ordered the NAR terrorists to plant the bomb.
    That investigation has been ongoing for years.
    Although many believe the attack was a bid to destabilize a country trying to leave behind years of terrorism, the underlying reasons for the bombing have never fully emerged.