Bologna marks 46th anniversary of 1980 station bombing as Fakir relatives join march alongside mayor under police protection
Thousands marched from Palazzo d'Accursio to the station on 2 August 2026 for the 46th anniversary of the bombing that killed 85 people, with relatives of Abderrahim Fakir walking at the front alongside mayor Matteo Lepore, who attended under escort after social-media threats linked to the Fakir case.
Bologna held its annual commemoration of the 2 August 1980 station bombing on Sunday, with a procession from Palazzo d'Accursio to the site of the attack that killed 85 people and wounded more than 200. The cortege was led by mayor Matteo Lepore, who has been under police protection following a wave of social-media threats connected to the death of 42-year-old Moroccan national Abderrahim Fakir during a police stop in the Pilastro district on 19 July.
Relatives of Fakir, his niece Yossra and sister Khadija, positioned themselves at the front of the march before it began, greeting Lepore and joining the thousands of participants. "L'abbraccio della città mi ha commossa. Mi sono stati tutti vicini e questo riconferma il fatto che Bologna è una città unita," Yossra said. A large delegation of Democratic Party administrators from across Italy accompanied Lepore, including Ilaria Salis from Genoa and Bari mayor Vito Leccese.
Per noi era importante essere qui, essere vicini al sindaco Matteo Lepore e alla città di Bologna in questo giorno di ricordo.
President Sergio Mattarella issued a message stating that the bombing left "a deep mark engraved in republican history and in the conscience of Italians." He described the attack as part of "the neo-fascist strategy of terror" that sought to destroy the values of liberty, justice and democracy. Senate president Ignazio La Russa wrote on Facebook that "judicial truth has attributed with definitive sentence the 'fascist matrix' responsibility for this horrible massacre" and called for the search for the complete truth to continue.
Prime minister Giorgia Meloni called the bombing "one of the darkest and most dramatic pages of national history" and said the nation joins the victims' families and the people of Bologna in a day of mourning and commemoration. Undersecretary of the Interior Nicola Molteni, representing the government, said the 10:25 a.m. attack was "a terrorist act of neo-fascist matrix that tore apart the lives of many people, of a city, of an entire nation."
Bari mayor Vito Leccese noted that seven citizens of Bari were among the 85 dead: Sonia Burri, Francesco Cesare Diomede Fresa, Vito Diomede Fresa, Errica Frigerio, Patrizia Messineo, Giuseppe Patruno and Silvana Serravalli. "Justice has ascertained the neo-fascist matrix of the massacre and the system of misdirections that tried to push the truth away," Leccese said, adding that institutions must ensure that truth is never faded by time.
At the rear of the procession, activists from Potere al Popolo marched separately with a banner reading "Uno Bianca e Fakir, basta omicidi e stragi di Stato" and chanted "Giustizia per Fakir." The group left the station square without incident after commemorating the victims. Lepore, addressing the crowd, said "violence has no political colour" and called on Italy to "get back on the road," describing the square as "a pillar of Italian and European civil conscience."
