It ended in an inferno. Shots hit the farmhouse from three sides. Two carabinieri carried away a seriously injured colleague who had a bullet wound in his head. Smoke grenades crashed into the upper floor of the house. Sparks flew, a flame ignited, and then a whole fire. There was a dead person lying by the stream, near the small wooden bridge. Shot in the head, there was a note stuck to his stomach. The television station Rai 3 interrupted its program and broadcast live what was happening that morning on March 1, 1996 in South Tyrol, up in the slopes north of Merano, in the small town of Riffian.
When the flames died down because there was hardly anything left to burn, the police found the person responsible for it all. He was sitting in a shack so small that you couldn’t stand upright. His head hung on his knees.
The seventh dead.
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