Stories

The incident

Carlo Giuliani, aged 23, died when he was hit by a bullet in Piazza Alimonda, Genoa, Italy on 20th July 2001. The city of Genoa was hosting the G8 summit and there were scenes of urban guerilla warfare between anti-globalisation protesters and law enforcement agencies.

In late morning the 3rd Lombardy Battalion of the Carabinieri had received orders from the police operations control room to move to the Marassi prison area, where protesters from the Black Bloc group were creating a disturbance. But the battalion headed instead towards Via Tolemaide, the street the Tute Bianche section of the demonstration was passing through at the time. They tried to call them back from the control room in the police station, but communications were impossible and so it was decided to send the 12th Sicily Battalion to their aid. Just before 5:30 pm, fifty or so Carabinieri and the battalion's two Land Rover Defenders moved along Via Caffa, a street off Via Tolemaide. They attempted to charge the march from one side, but at a point near a square called Piazza Alimonda the demonstrators starting getting the better of them so they withdrew. One of the two Land Rovers managed to get away but the other one got hemmed in against a rubbish bin and was surrounded by demonstrators. In the vehicle there was Mario Placanica, an auxiliary Carabinieri police officer suffering from a head injury. Placanica drew his handgun.

Just a few yards away from the Land Rover's rear door there was Carlo Giuliani, his face covered by a balaclava, who, perhaps after seeing the gun, had picked up a fire extinguisher from the ground and was brandishing it at the vehicle. Placanica fired two shots and Carlo fell to the ground. The Carabinieri police officer driving the Land Rover, Filippo Cavataio, managed to get the vehicle free but as he manoeuvred it he ran over Carlo's body twice.

Other details have emerged from photographs: a stone, initially about one and a half yards away from Carlo's body, can be seen in subsequent photos stained with blood, right next to the injured boy's head. Immediately after those photos were taken, Deputy Police Chief Adriano Lauro, who was in charge of maintaining public order in that area, could be seen chasing a protester and shouting “It was you that killed him, you bastard, with your stone”. Thanks to these photos taken by eyewitnesses, the terrible truth emerges: the stone had been picked up by a police officer who had crashed it repeatedly against the forehead of the then lifeless Carlo Giuliani to lend credibility to that first version of the facts.

The trial

The case against Mario Placanica for the murder of Carlo Giuliani was dismissed on 5th May 2003. Placanica's version, that he had fired in the air in legitimate self-defence, was deemed credible. According to the official reconstruction, the shot ricocheted off a piece of rubble. This version of events has always been refuted by the Giuliani family forensic pathologist and co-author of the autopsy report, who say it was a direct shot.
Carlo's parents, Giuliano Giuliani and Haidi Gaggio, through the Piazza Carlo Giuliani Committee, have opposed the sentence in every conceivable way, including an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. The Court announced its decision in August 2009: the judges rejected the appeal against the Italian state and established that Placanica had actually fired in legitimate self-defence. The Court, however, acknowledged that Italy should have set up an inquiry to ascertain whether Carlo's death was attributable to the poor management of public order, and ruled that Italy had to pay compensation of 40,000 euros to the Giuliani family.

In October 2013 the Giuliani family filed a civil lawsuit against the Interior and Defence Ministries, Deputy Police Chief Lauro and Mario Placanica. The first hearings took place in January 2014.

Also in 2014, Alessandro Sallusti, Editor of the newspaper Il Giornale, was put on trial for defamation, following the filing of a lawsuit by the Giuliani family. In a televised debate, Sallusti had repeated several times that the police had been right to shoot Carlo Giuliani, wrongly claiming that Carlo was about to kill a Carabinieri officer with an iron bar.

In 2013 Giuliano Giuliani published the book “Non si archivia un omicidio” (“A Murder Can't be Dismissed”), in which he recounts his version of the death of his son.
Many musicians, Italian and internationally, have dedicated songs to the memory of Carlo Giuliani. These include Piazza Alimonda by Francesco Guccini, Zeta Reticoli by the Meganoids and Solamente por pensar by the Spanish group Ska-P.