Kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro

The kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, also referred to in Italy as the Moro case (Italian: caso Moro), was a seminal event in Italian political history. On the morning of 16 March 1978, the day on which a new cabinet led by Giulio Andreotti was to have undergone a confidence vote in the Italian Parliament, the car of Aldo Moro, former prime minister and then president of the Christian Democracy party (Italian: Democrazia Cristiana, or DC, Italy's relative majority party at the time), was assaulted by a group of far-left terrorists known as the Red Brigades (Italian: Brigate Rosse, or BR) in via Fani in Rome. Firing automatic weapons, the terrorists killed Moro's bodyguards — two Carabinieri in Moro's car and three policemen in the following car — and kidnapped him. The events remain a national trauma. Ezio Mauro of La Repubblica described the events as Italy's 9/11. While Italy was not the sole European country to experience extremist terrorism, which also occurred in France, Germany, Ireland, and Spain, the murder of Moro was the apogee of Italy's Years of Lead.

On 9 May 1978, Moro's body was found in the boot of a Renault 4 in via Caetani after 54 days of imprisonment. Moro had been subjected to a political trial by a "people's court" set up by the BR, which had asked the Italian government for an exchange of prisoners. The car with Moro's body was found very close to both locations of the national offices of the DC and the Italian Communist Party (Italian: Partito Comunista Italiano, or PCI, the largest Communist party of Western Europe) in Rome. The BR were opposed to Moro and the PCI's Historic Compromise. On 23 January 1983, an Italian court sentenced 32 members of the BR to life imprisonment for their role in the kidnapping and murder of Moro, among other crimes. Many elements and facts have never been fully cleared up, despite a series of trials, and this has led to the promotion of a number of alternative theories about the events, including conspiracy theories.