Fact check
Is it true: Aldo Moro kidnapping by Red Brigades (Mar 16 - May 9 1978)?
It's still under investigation.
Ongoing investigation. The core of the story is settled: members of the Red Brigades, among them Mario Moretti (life sentence, 1983), Prospero Gallinari and Anna Laura Braghetti, were convicted of kidnapping Moro, killing his five escorts and murdering him. The claim that the Brigades were helped, steered or shielded by Italian intelligence, Gladio, the P2 lodge or foreign services is not proven: no court or commission has established it. But the official account has been shown to be incomplete: the 2014–18 parliamentary commission concluded that the version built in the 1980s was a 'partial truth', a US State Department adviser on the government's crisis committee later said Moro was 'sacrificed' for Italy's stability, and in mid-2026 a Rome judge refused to close a prosecutors' file on possible additional participants at Via Fani and ordered about six more months of investigation. Press reports describe the checks as covering possible additional participants and external support networks; one report (La Stampa, via Antimafia Duemila) also mentions Gallinari's 1977 prison escape, said to have involved the secret services. None describes an inquiry into state, Gladio or P2 direction of the kidnapping.
The claim
Proponents say the Red Brigades did not act alone: that Italian intelligence, the Gladio stay-behind network, the P2 lodge or foreign services helped, steered or deliberately failed to stop the 1978 kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, because his 'historic compromise' with the Communist Party threatened the Cold War order. That the Brigades themselves carried out the kidnapping and killing is not in dispute; it is the settled, true part of the story.
Key evidence
Via Fani ambush: precision that suggested professional military training
Mario Moretti convicted of murder — life sentence 1983
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