Death Takes No Holiday

An explosion kills at least 86 travelers in Bologna

The scene was familiar to millions of travelers throughout the world--a hot, crowded railroad station in midsummer, tourists with heavy luggage looking anxiously for welcoming friends or hurrying to departing trains. The temperature outside was in the high 90s, and people entered the refuge of air-conditioned waiting rooms and a restaurant with sighs of relief. At 10:25 a.m. last Saturday morning, the stone terminal in Bologna, Italy, was a place of pleasant expectations.

There was no warning of what was to come. The explosion ripped through one wing of the terminal, blowing out thick walls, scattering heavy timbers, lifting the roof slowly and then letting it fall with a crash. A yellow-red flame flashed through the building and a mushroom-shaped cloud formed over the area. Said one witness: "It was a nightmare."

Rescuers began to dig through the debris, at first with their hands, later with cranes and bulldozers. One by one, they retrieved the bodies, some so dismembered that it was hard to get an exact count. But authorities said that at least 86 people had died in the blast and that 270 were injured, 20 seriously.

In another age, authorities would have assumed that only some kind of natural calamity--an explosion of escaping gas, perhaps--could have blindly caused so much death and destruction. And for a moment last week police thought that perhaps a defective boiler had been to blame. Then they found a crater, eight inches deep, about four feet around, in the floor of the second-class waiting room. It appeared to have been caused by a bomb.

By that time phone calls were also coming in claiming credit for the horror. Someone said it was the work of the left-wing Red Brigades, but later another caller denied that the group was responsible. Authorities took far more seriously the claim of a neo-Fascist group called the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei. A spokesman for the group said that the bombing had been carried out to avenge a decision made that day by a Bologna judge to try eight right-wing terrorists for bombing a train in 1974 and killing twelve people.

The N.A.R. appears to be a coalition of several neo-Fascist terrorist groups in Italy. In its present form, the group first appeared on Dec. 23, 1977, attacking the offices of the Christian Democratic and Communist parties in Rome. In the past three years, the unit has launched about 25 assaults and killed Judge Mario Amato, who was investigating them in Rome. The right-wing terrorists aim at undermining public confidence in the state by attacks on the innocent that create fear.

If, indeed, the explosion turns out to have been the work of terrorists, the attack would be the most severe of its kind in Italy's history. In 1946, militant Zionists killed 90 by blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, then the headquarters for the controlling British officials. As the body count continued in Bologna, last Saturday's blast may surpass even that grisly record.

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