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SV & CU Communist student demonstrators marching through Rome street with banners and chanting
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GV Students march down roadway
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GV Demonstrators with banners and red flags (2 shots)
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GV Demonstrators passing road blocked by police vehicles
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LV & SV Students in streets listening to speech from communist school leader
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In Bari, an estimated 10,000 ultra-leftists threw petrol bombs at shops and offices and hurled bricks at para-military police. They dropped red carnations on a blood patch at the spot where Petrone died. In Bologna, whose civil administration is Communist-controlled, students attacked MSI offices and fired shots at police, but no-one was injured. In Milan, a suspected right-winger Saverior Botticelli, 19, was beaten up by left-wing youths. And, in nearby Como, left-wingers wearing masks and wielding knives and monkey wrenches, were said to have clubbed and stabbed a 16-year-old boy.




Initials BB/1915



Script is copyright Reuters Limited. All rights reserved

Background: An estimated 15,000 chanting students marched through Rome on Tuesday (29 November) protesting against the killing of a fellow-Communist youth the previous night in the southern Italian town of Bari. The youth, 18-year-old Benedetto Petrone, was knifed to death in a ??? with a group of extreme Rightists.

SYNOPSIS: The students were members of the Communist Party Youth Movement (FGCI), of which Petrone had been a member.

The marchers shouted out slogans and called for Italy's Interior Minister Francesco Cossiga to shut down what they called 'Fascist hideouts'.

They wanted Signor Cossiga to resign because he had not closed down offices of the Italian Socialist Movement (MSI), a neo-Fascist party, after some of its members allegedly shot dead another left-wing youth, Walter Rossi, in Rome on 30 September. In fact, MSI members in Bari were celebrating the opening of a new office when the clash occurred in which petrone was killed. Ill-feeling between left and right-wingers in Bari had been building up during the previous week.

This Rome protest passed off without incidents. But in Bari, leftists burnt down he MSI office and firemen had to put out several other fires.

In Rome's Piazza Santi Apostoli, the young Communists heard a speech from a Communist school leader, as police in riot gear stood by. Similar rallies by thousands of students in Naples and Florence also went off peacefully.