Euractiv 21.3.2026 /
https://www.euractiv.com/news/italian-a ... king-bomb/
Italian anarchists blow themselves up while making bomb
Local reports suggest they were planning a protest in support of jailed figurehead Alfredo Cospito
Two Italian anarchists were killed in an explosion at a cabin on the outskirts of Rome, apparently while making a bomb, media reports said Saturday.
The couple, named as
Sara Ardizzone and
Alessandro Mercogliano, died on Friday while preparing a protest meant to draw attention to the fate of jailed anarchist figurehead Alfredo Cospito, Italian media reports said.
The couple were known to the police for their activism in the anarchist movement.
Cospito, 58, is serving a 20-year sentence for a series of parcel bombs and attacks targeting the authorities.
He is being held in highly restrictive prison conditions applied to terrorists and mafia members, which some rights groups have condemned as excessively harsh.
Cospito staged a hunger strike three years ago in protest at the measures, known as ’41-bis’ after an article in Italy’s prison code.
A court is set to rule in May whether to relax his detention conditions, and the press suggested Ardizzone and Mercogliano could have been preparing a bombing to draw public attention to his case.
The La Repubblica newspaper reported they had been preparing an attack, which it said was not aimed at killing people but “an act of protest”.
Ardizzone had told a court during a 2025 trial that she and Mercogliano were “partners in life and in the struggle”, according to the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
She defended violent protest in her testimony, telling the court: “There’s an enormous difference between the violence of the oppressed and that of the oppressors: the former follows an ethical code, the latter, none.”
