On the morning of 16 March 1978, gunmen from the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse), a far-left militant group, ambushed the car of Aldo Moro, a former Italian prime minister and then-president of the Christian Democracy party, in via Fani, a street in Rome. As Moro's Fiat 130 and its escort car entered the street, the attackers blocked both vehicles and opened fire, killing all five of Moro's bodyguards: Carabinieri Domenico Ricci and Oreste Leonardi, and policemen Francesco Zizzi, Giulio Rivera, and Raffaele Iozzino. Ricci and Leonardi, in the lead car, were killed first; Iozzino returned fire twice before he was shot and killed; Zizzi died in a hospital a few hours later. Moro was forced into a getaway car and taken into captivity. The Red Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack in a phone call to the ANSA news agency.
Moro was held for 54 days. The exact location of his imprisonment is disputed: trial reconstructions pointed to an apartment on via Camillo Montalcini in Rome, while Moro's brother and other researchers later argued, citing sand and vegetation traces found on Moro's body and in the car where he was found, that he may have been held near a seaside location instead. During captivity, Moro wrote 86 letters to Christian Democracy colleagues, his family, and Pope Paul VI, appealing for a negotiated release; some letters reached their recipients, while others surfaced only years later in a Red Brigades apartment. The Red Brigades demanded a prisoner exchange. Italian political leaders divided between a hardline faction, backed by most of the Christian Democracy and the Italian Communist Party, that rejected any negotiation, and a minority faction that favored it. On 22 April 1978, Pope Paul VI publicly appealed for Moro's release without preconditions, a stance Moro reportedly resented as evidence he had been abandoned by the Vatican.
On 9 May 1978, after a summary trial staged by the group, Moro was shot and killed. Red Brigades member Mario Moretti stated publicly in 1993 that he personally fired the fatal shots, using a Walther PPK pistol and then, after it jammed, a Skorpion vz. 61 submachine gun; a second member, identified only as Maccari, was later revealed to have taken part. Moro's body was found the same day in the boot of a Renault 4 parked in via Michelangelo Caetani, in Rome's historic centre, near the national offices of both the Christian Democracy and the Italian Communist Party.
Investigations led to five trials in Rome's Court of Assizes. On 23 January 1983, an Italian court sentenced 32 Red Brigades members to life imprisonment for their roles in the kidnapping and murder. Separately, philosopher Antonio Negri was arrested on 7 April 1979 and charged with leading the Red Brigades and masterminding the operation; he was exonerated of the kidnapping about a year later after no link to the group was established, and most charges against him, including seventeen murders, were dropped for lack of evidence within months of his arrest. Many details of the case remain disputed. Italian judicial inquiries have examined a range of conspiracy theories involving Italian and foreign intelligence services and dismissed them for lack of evidence, while acknowledging that Moro had powerful political enemies and that Italian police made documented failures during the search for him.
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