Italian police are investigating after two well-known anarchist activists were found dead in the rubble of an exploded farmhouse, apparently by a bomb they were cooking.
Two anarchists have been found dead in the remains of a derelict farmhouse in a Rome suburb. While the property was remote enough that the explosion on Thursday was apparently not heard by neighbours, the alarm was later raised when a passing jogger noticed a body amid the rubble of the collapsed building.
While police initially believed the two bodies discovered were those of unfortunate homeless rough sleepers caught in an unsound, collapsing building, the fact that one of the pair had apparently had his arm blown clean off, and that they had distinctive tattoos, prompted officers to investigate the scene for explosives. The dead were later identified as hard-left anarchist extremists Alessandro Mercogliano, 53-years-old, and his 35-year-old girlfriend Sara Ardizzone.
Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore reports Mercogliano has a long criminal history of extremist politics and had been jailed for five years in 2019 for involvement in an anarchist terror cell that targeted politicians, journalists, and police officers with explosives. The paper states he was also on trial for a separate terrorist incident in Turin.
Ardizzone had previously declared in an Italian court during a trial for anarchist extremism that she and Mercogliano were “partners in life and in the struggle”, and that she considered herself an anarchist and “enemy of the state”, reports Libero Quotidiano.
Both had been linked to a cell of anarchists launching direct actions — attacks — in support of notorious Italian anarchist Alfredo Cospito, who is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement for kneecapping the head of an Italian nuclear power company in 2012 and bombing a police barracks.
Police suspect Mercogliano may have been bomb-making at the time of the fatal blast, explaining the loss of his arm at the time of being discovered by sniffer-dogs. They are investigating whether the fertiliser-based device they suspect was being created proved too unstable and spontaneously exploded.
Officers raided properties linked to the local anarchist scene and interrogated several known local anarchists in a bid to build a picture around the blast. An important line of investigation is what the intended target for the bomb may have been. Italian media notes the derelict farmhouse was close to a railway junction, which has been a particular target for attacks by anarchists in recent months, and a police barracks could also have been an intended target.
A facility of Italian defence and aerospace giant Leonardo has also been named as a potential target for an attack by the would-be anarchist bombers. A spokesman for the Italian government raised the possibility that the explosive device was intended to attack democracy itself, stating it was conspicuous that the pair managed to blow themselves up on the eve of the now-passed Italian constitutional reform referendum.
Libero Quotidiano reports Italy’s right-wing populist League party of Matteo Salvini spoke out on the farmhouse blast, saying the death of the anarchists demonstrated the murderous intent of the hard-left. “For far too long,” the country has contended with anarchists attacking infrastructure such as high-speed trains, the party said.
The paper notes the League party has a particular interest in the case, given that the woman killed in the incident, Ardizzone, had been implicated in an anarchist mob attack on League activists during an election campaign in 2022. Some 50 black-clad anarchists descended upon a gathering of League members and beat them with poles, including several women.
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