On the night of Monday 30 January there was an attack with a Molotov cocktail on the Town Hall 5 in Milan. Two local police cars were burned.
The investigators of the Digos (General Investigations and Special Operations Division) and the Police Headquarters have little doubt about the perpetrator. Suspicions on the anarchist area and the initiatives for the revocation of the 41 bis (the hard prison regime) to Alfredo Cospito detained in the prison of Sassari.
This follows the two attacks that hit Italian diplomatic representatives in Barcelona and Berlin on 27 January, defacing a wall of the entrance to the Italian Consulate building in Barcelona and setting fire to the car with the diplomatic license plate of a diplomatic official on duty at the Italian Embassy in Berlin.
For both attacks, intelligence sources are following the Fai-Fri anarchist trail, to trace those responsible.
Fai, the international anarchist federation, of which Alfredo Cospito is the theorist, and FRI, its international branch, have intensified the protest against the 41 bis, the harsh prison, to which he is subjected.
Alfredo Cospito, 55 years old, is an anarchist who from a young age repudiated any form of power: for him, the state, capitalism are to be fought violently.
He has become a symbol for many activists who recognize themselves in the anarchist protest in Italy and abroad.
However, the entire anarchist spectrum has a common element as its central ideological nucleus: the need for the annulment of the state or in any case of the most pressing forms of constituted power.
Cospito was born in Pescara and is a member of the Informal Anarchist Federation, an anarcho-insurrectionist group that over the years has become the protagonist of various attacks against the state.
Sentenced to 12 years and 3 months for terrorist attacks or subversion and other crimes, he must also definitively serve another sentence for further terrorist acts (such as sending explosive devices and packets against politicians, journalists and the forces of the order) and for the crime of political massacre.
For the latter, after a passage in Cassation, the proceeding returned to the Court of Appeal of Turin, with the hypothesis of a crime reconfigured into a massacre against the State and with a request for a life sentence with 12 months of daytime isolation.
After being convicted he is serving a sentence in a harsh prison regime in Sassari, because even behind bars he continues to spread propaganda and incite his comrades to action.
According to the former judge Marta Cartabia who decided to sign an ad hoc decree against the anarchist leader to bring him to 41 bis, Cospito thanks to the normal prison regime could continue to coordinate subversive activities.
«Cospito’s communications with anarchist realities outside the prison circuit appear assiduous and produce the effect of helping to identify strategic objectives and to stimulate direct actions of attack on institutions».
Cospito, therefore, still managed to coordinate a highly operational and rooted anarchist network at the European level.
He is the first anarchist to be detained in a regime created to combat organized crime.
He has been on hunger strike for over 100 days and since his protest began, while waiting for the Cassation to discuss the confirmation or removal of 41-bis, anarchists have launched an international mobilization in Italy and the rest of the world calling to damage symbols and representatives of the State.
Since October 2022, the anarchist galaxy, a fragmented reality, divided into many souls often in open conflict with each other, has regrouped behind the slogan: “free Alfredo”. And the actions in Italy and in the rest of the world follow one another.
The most serious alarm bell had been the attack on Susanna Schlein last December 2, first councilor of the Italian embassy in Athens.
For some time the anarchists have raised the bar: it is no longer a question of demonstrative acts, but of street mobilizations and more and more serious dynamite acts.
January 28 was also the last day of an “international call to action” launched in recent weeks via the web on the sites of the anarchist galaxy to reaffirm solidarity with Cospito.
A subversive initiative, explain intelligence sources, lasted a week and conveyed in Spanish.
In recent days, less striking actions have also been claimed between Rome, Milan, Turin and Buenos Aires.
The network of Cospito loyalists is very fierce, and can also count on the support of far-left union fringes.
Digos and Ros (the special operational group of the carabinieri) monitor the squares. The most attended event was that of Turin a few weeks ago, where six hundred people came from all over Italy.
But the greatest fear is now represented by possible individual actions, by “mavericks”, more unpredictable and more difficult to control or single people who do not belong to organized anarchist fringes.
According to a report from the Carabinieri of Ros, among Cospito’s points of reference are the Russian anarchists who, with acts of terrorism, murders and attacks against the “patrons” have transmitted “strength, tenacity, coherence and living experience” to the “comrades of today”.
In Italy, the anarchic insurrectionist movement, distinguished precisely by its particularly violent means of action, represents the greatest terrorist threat to Italy at the moment, despite the fact that the danger has long been dormant.
Observing the rapid spread of the attacks, it can be deduced that the network is able to organize itself not only in Europe, but throughout the rest of the world.For this reason, in addition to observing the most extremist fringes of anarchists through the monitoring of social media and websites, Italy has strengthened its collaboration with law enforcement and intelligence forces from foreign countries, especially Greece, Spain, France and Chile.
