Raffaele Fiore, commander of the Red Brigades’ Turin division, died today at age 71 after never renouncing his extremist ideology. Sentenced to life imprisonment for terrorism, he had been on conditional release since 1997. Fiore orchestrated one of Italy’s most notorious political murders: the 1977 assassination of Carlo Casalegno, deputy editor of Turin newspaper *La Stampa*. On November 16, 1977, Fiore personally fired four silenced shots into Casalegno’s head during a commando ambush, later claiming the killing as an “execution of a state servant.”
Months later, he participated in the March 1978 kidnapping of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in Rome’s Via Fani, where Moro’s five bodyguards were massacred. During the operation—which involved militants disguised as airline crew—Fiore’s submachine gun jammed, preventing him from targeting Moro’s vehicle. Arrested in a Turin bar in March 1979, Fiore served 18 years before his contested conditional release. Post-prison, he worked for social cooperative Futura in Sarmato, near Piacenza. His life trajectory—from impoverished childhood in Bari to factory labor in Milan, radicalization through union activism, and leadership in armed struggle—was documented in Aldo Grandi’s book *The Last Brigadist*.