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Italian police planted petrol bombs on G8 summit protesters
By Jessie Grimond in Rome
30 July 2002
Italian police planted two Molotov cocktails in a school where anti-globalisation pro-testers were sleeping to justify a
brutal crackdown during last year's G8 summit in Genoa.
A policeman has confessed that he planted the explosives following a year of acrimony over the handling of security at
the summit where a protester was shot dead by the police.
"I brought the Molotov cocktail to the Diaz school. I obeyed the order of one of my superiors," the 25-year-old unnamed
officer told prosecutors investigating the summit. The Molotov cocktails were planted in the school to justify the
police raids on the school, he said.
His superior, Pietro Troiani, from a mobile police unit in Rome, is already being investigated after another colleague
accused him of providing false information to justify the raids.
At the time, the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, insisted that the raids proved that the school held violent
anarchists who had wrecked the city. The presence of Molotov cocktails has been held up by the police as justification
for their raids on the school. They were shown off to journalists along with a nail bomb, two sledge-hammers and a
pickaxe, also said to have been gathered at the scene.
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