This is the story of a humble servant of the fatherland who died at 26 for one single fault: investigating black subversion. He was a son of Sardinia and Barbagia, Francesco Straullu, born on 10 July 1955 in Nuoro. Like so many young people at the time, he had looked for a future in the police, enlisting in the police academy in 1974. When he died, forty years ago, on 21 October 1981, he had the rank of captain, promoted in 1979 after being assigned to the Rome group and assigned to Digos, where together with his superior, Chief Commissioner Giorgio Minozzi, he had worked for a long time on the subversion front.

Those were hot years, years of lead. It was precisely the black terrorists he was investigating who killed him, together with other officials from the Police Headquarters and who, between the seventies and the Ottana, made numerous victims among the police and magistrates, starting with judge Mario Amato, killed in Rome in July 1980 by the Nar, the revolutionary armed groups, the right-wing response to the red subversion of the Br. Of the commando who shot point blank at the magistrate, guilty of having dealt with neo-fascist terrorism, there were some names that then recur also in the facts of Acilia, in which captain Straullu and the chosen guard Ciriaco Di Roma, originally from Avellino, lost their lives.

The facts

On the morning of 21 October 1981, Francesco Straullu and Ciriaco Di Roma were walking along via Ostiense, at Ponte Landrone, in the territory of Acilia, to go to the police station. They usually used an armored Alfetta 2000. They knew they were being targeted by terrorists precisely because of the delicate investigations they were carrying out. The Sardinian captain had scored some important results in the fight against black subversion and above all he had convinced Laura Lauricella, the ex-partner of Egidio Giuliani, a detained gang leader and considered irreducible to repent and collaborate with justice. This "conversion" had precisely allowed Straullu to hit the terrorists who then swore revenge against the Nuorese captain.

His driver, Di Roma, was forced to slow down and the car was hit by numerous bursts of tracer bullets, chosen to be able to pierce the armored walls. That day, unfortunately, Di Roma and Straullu were instead traveling on a Fiat Ritmo that didn't have much of an armored car, since their car was not available, and they ended up riddled with bullets. Their corpses were unrecognizable, torn apart by war bullets, so much so that the terrorists themselves prevented the only woman who made up the commando from approaching the car, according to the chronicles of the time. The woman was called Francesca Mambro, an important name in the world of right-wing terrorism, also condemned for the massacre of the Bologna station, but accuses that she, as well as her partner Giuseppe Valerio (Giusva) Fioravanti, has always rejected, admitting instead responsibility for other crimes, including that of Captain Straullu. Mambro, however, as well as other members of the Nar (for example Luigi Ciavardini) and of the terrorist groups of fascist origin, was the daughter of a police marshal, but this did not weigh at all on the commando who acted with great brutality and then ended the morning in a restaurant.