A senior regional official in Italy who used to be a member of a neofascist group has sparked anger after attempting to clear the names of three people convicted of one of the country’s worst terrorist attacks.
Marcello De Angelis, the communications chief of the Lazio region, made the remarks days after Italy marked the 43rd anniversary of the bombing of Bologna train station, in which 85 people were killed and more than 200 were injured.
Five members of the now defunct Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR) neofascist militant group were convicted of the attack on 2 August 1980. However, writing on social media, De Angelis said three – Giusva Fioravanti, Francesca Mambro and Luigi Ciavardini – had “nothing to do with the Bologna massacre”.
The attack was the worst that took place during the social and political turmoil in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s that are known as the “years of lead”.
De Angelis, a former member of Terza Posizione, a neofascist group that was banned after the bombing, claimed that he knew “for certain” that the three were innocent.
He added that the anniversary was “always a very difficult day for anyone who knows the truth, which every year is trampled over, even by the highest figures of the state”.
De Angelis was appointed communications chief for Lazio by Francesco Rocca, the president of the region who is backed by prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing coalition. Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party has neofascist origins, was also criticised last week for failing to define the Bologna massacre as a neofascist terrorist attack.
Opposition leaders have called for De Angelis to resign or be sacked.
Elly Schlein, leader of the centre-left Democratic party, said: “The Bologna massacre came out of a fascist matrix. If someone struggles to recognise it they are not suitable to hold institutional positions of any kind.”
Daniele Leodori, the head of the Democratic party in Lazio, and Mario Ciarla, the party’s whip in the regional assembly, wrote in a joint statement that De Angelis had attempted to “rewrite the history of the Bologna massacre”.
Rocca told the Italian media on Monday that De Angelis’s comments were his “personal opinion”, adding that Meloni was “not happy” about the row surrounding them.
“She asked me to clarify with De Angelis, and for this reason I will see him today,” he said.
De Angelis compared himself to Giordano Bruno, the Italian philosopher burned at the stake for heresy by the Catholic church in 1600. “If I have to pay for this and be set alight like … Bruno for having breached a dogma, I am proud to do so,” he wrote on Facebook.
From 2006 and 2008 De Angelis was a senator with National Alliance, the party that emerged from the neofascist Italian Social Movement before morphing into Brothers of Italy, which Meloni co-founded in 2012.
