Italian anarchists shoot nuclear executive

This would certainly seem to be an escalation: An anarchist group claimed responsibility on Friday for kneecapping an Italian nuclear engineering executive and warned it would strike another seven times at the firm’s parent company, Finmeccanica. In a four-page letter sent to an Italian newspaper, the group, calling itself the Olga Nucleus of the Informal ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.

This would certainly seem to be an escalation:

This would certainly seem to be an escalation:

An anarchist group claimed responsibility on Friday for kneecapping an Italian nuclear engineering executive and warned it would strike another seven times at the firm’s parent company, Finmeccanica.

In a four-page letter sent to an Italian newspaper, the group, calling itself the Olga Nucleus of the Informal Anarchist Federation-International Revolutionary Front, said two of its members had shot Roberto Adinolfi, the CEO of Ansaldo Nucleare, in Genoa on Monday.[…]

The letter takes aim at Adinolfi, calling him a "sorcerer of the atomic industry" and criticising him for claiming in an interview that none of the deaths during the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011 were due to nuclear incidents.

"Adinolfi knows well that it is only a matter of time before a European Fukushima kills on our continent," the letter stated.

The group, named after an imprisoned Greek anarchist, has a pretty substantial track record

The same anarchist group claimed last year to have sent letter bombs targeting, among others, Deutsche Bank’s boss Josef Ackermann. One of these blew off a finger of the director general of Italy’s tax enforcement agency Equitalia in December.

On Friday, a suspect package containing powder but no detonator was sent to an Equitalia office in Rome while in Naples a citizen protest outside tax authority offices degenerated into clashes with the police.

As I noted after a similarly named Greek anarchist group sent off a series of mail bombs in 2010, thse groups seem to be fairly random in their choice of targets. Hopefully, the level of violence won’t escalate further. (The U.S. recently witnessed its own brand of alleged anarchist violence when five men were arrested and charged with attempting to blow up a bridge in northeast Ohio.)

Last October, I spoke with Italian columnist and satirist Beppe about Italy’s "Black Bloc" protesters. 

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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