Naples 1988: the international terrorism forgotten by Italy’s history
Lediplomate.media – printed on 03/05/2026
By Giuseppe Gagliano, President of the Centro Studi Strategici Carlo De Cristoforis (Como, Italy)
The link between Tokyo, Beirut, and the Italian Mediterranean
There is a page in Italian history that seems more repressed than forgotten. It is the Naples massacre of April 14, 1988, when a Ford Fiesta loaded with explosives, nails, and bolts exploded outside the USO American recreational circle in Calata San Marco, a few steps from Piazza Municipio. Five people were killed, fifteen others injured. The culprit was neither the Camorra, nor the Red Brigades, nor a group from the years of Italian lead. It was a man from afar: Junzo Okudaira, a militant of the Japanese Red Army, one of the most disturbing specters of international terrorism in the second half of the 20th century.
This bombing was not an isolated incident. It was the culmination of a network linking Tokyo, Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, Tripoli, Rome, and Naples. A network in which revolutionary ideology, the Palestinian cause, sponsoring states, Middle Eastern logistics, and European vulnerabilities intertwined in a single geography of political violence. Even before talk of globalization, terrorism was already worldwide.
The lesson forgotten
The Naples massacre of 1988 teaches us that terrorism never arises in a vacuum. It needs ideology, but also logistics. It needs fanaticism, but also passports, bases, money, cover-ups, complacent states, international networks. The romantic figure of the armed militant is a lie. Behind the terrorist act, there are always infrastructures, protections, calculations, interests.
The Japanese Red Army was small in numbers but huge in its ability to move in the fractures of the international system. Naples was one of its bloodiest traces. And perhaps that is precisely why we must remember it: because it shows that Italy was not just on the sidelines of the global history of terrorism. It was one of the crossroads.
