Italy: Four Killed, One Arrested in Milan Shooting

Four people have been reportedly killed after a man opened fire at the Palace of Justice in the Italian city of Milan before being arrested.

Officials said the gunman, identified by local media as Claudio Giardiello, was a defendant in a bankruptcy case.

The Ansa news agency said he shot a bankruptcy court judge, a lawyer and one other man. The fourth person is thought to have had a heart attack.

The suspect was arrested in the suburb of Vimercate as he fled on a motorbike.

Interior Minister, Angelino Alfano, said the “presumed assassin” was now being held at a carabinieri military police barracks in the Milan area.

The incident has prompted questions about security at the courthouse, focusing on how the gunman managed to smuggle a weapon into the building, use it several times and escape.

The sound of gunfire sparked panic inside the Palace of Justice on Wednesday morning, with hundreds of people pouring down stairways towards the exits while police and military police officers searched for the gunman.

“All of a sudden we heard at least three or four shots,” lawyer Marcello Ilia told the AFP news agency outside the building.

“We tried to find out what was going on. There were suddenly lots of police officers who told us not to leave the room, they shut us in,” he said.

“After a few minutes we came out. They told us someone in a suit and tie was armed and at large in the court.”

Citing officials and witnesses, the newspaper La Repubblica reported that the gunman had been attending a bankruptcy hearing when a fight broke out inside the third floor courtroom.

He pulled out a weapon and shot the lawyer, whom has been named as Lorenzo Alberto Claris Appiani, as well as another man. The lawyer was hit in the chest and died soon afterwards, while the second victim died of his wounds in hospital.

The gunman then left the courtroom and headed to the office of appeals court judge, Fernando Ciampi, shooting him dead.

It is not known if the gunman had any links to the judge. The Associated Press news agency quoted a prosecutor, Edmondo Bruti Liberati, as identifying the other victims as the gunman’s lawyer in a fraudulent bankruptcy case, and his co-defendant.

A fourth person was found dead inside the building after apparently suffering a heart attack, possibly brought on by the shooting.

After hiding inside the Palace of Justice for more than an hour, the gunman fled on a motorbike, according to La Repubblica. He was arrested by carabinieri officers in Vimercate, about 25km (15 miles) north-east of central Milan, near the town of Monza.

Mr Giardiello was described as “aggressive” and “a little paranoid” by his former lawyer, Valerio Maraniello, in comments quoted by AFP news agency.

Visitors to the Palace of Justice have to pass through metal detectors. Lawyers and courthouse employees with official identification are, however, regularly waved through, according to the Associated Press.

Ansa reported that one of the metal detectors was broken on Wednesday morning.

“It’s disturbing that just anyone can get into the Palace of Justice armed,” said the head of the Lombardy region, Roberto Maroni.

“The fact that we’re not talking about an organisation which surveyed the place first makes it even more perturbing.”

The Palace of Justice is in the centre of Milan, only a few streets away from the city’s cathedral and main shopping district. The University of Cape Town (UCT) has voted to remove a statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes that had become the focus of student protests.

The monument will be taken down from the campus on Thursday and stored for “safe keeping”, UCT’s council said.

Students have been campaigning for the removal of the statue of the 19th century figure, unveiled in 1934. It was smeared with excrement last month.

Other monuments to colonialera leaders have also been recently vandalised.

The campaign has triggered a backlash. On Wednesday, crowds of white South Africans rallied at statues of Paul Kruger in the capital Pretoria, and Jan van Riebeeck in Cape Town, saying they were part of their heritage and should not be targeted.

South Africa’s media has been debating how the country should deal with its troubled past following the decision to remove the Cecil Rhodes statue. “Symbols aren’t inanimate objects, they are powerful devices that must be removed if they pay homage to a dark and oppressive past,” argues the Mail & Guardian.

But writing in the News24 website, Vusi Kweyama warns against “erasing” history: “We must teach our children how to remember in a way that is empowering and educational.”

The Daily Maverick highlights the need for more reforms. “The specific legacies of Rhodes and Kruger are largely meaningless… the statues are a symbol of all that remains to be done, of real transformation,” says the paper’s op-ed.

The Citizen is less optimistic, suggesting the “race war” in South African universities shows that “our academics are not succeeding at their most fundamental task: producing critical but tolerant graduates”.

Kruger, a contemporary of Rhodes, was an Afrikaner leader known for his opposition to the British in South Africa. Van Riebeeck was a Dutch coloniser who arrived in South Africa on 5 April 1652.

A white protester at his statue held a placard which read: “Hands off our heritage. This is genocide.”

The university’s 30-member council governs the institution and is made up of staff and students.

In a statement released after the voteon Wednesday, the council said it had immediately applied to the heritage authority to have the Rhodes statue taken down.

The council said it would temporarily remove the monument, over concerns for its safety, while the authority considered the application.

The statement said the area of the campus containing the statue “is a declared Provincial Heritage site and... thus subject to heritage legislation”.

The council said it had canvassed the views of students, academic staff, alumni and the public before making its decision.

“This is exactly how a university should work and we believe is an example to the country in dealing with heritage issues,” it added.

The vote followed weeks of protests by students across the campus demanding that the memorial to Rhodes be removed.

He was an Oxford-educated politician and mining business- man, who played a key role in the expansion of British rule in southern Africa.

Ramahiba Mahapha, the head of the Students Representative Council (SRC) told the BBC his statue was “a symbol of institutional racism”.

In a statement released on Wednesday the SRC said it “whole heartedly welcomed” the council’s decision. White minority rule ended in South Africa in 1994.

South Africa’s leftwing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party has backed the campaign to remove the statues.

“All these statues must go down,” its spokesman Mbuyseni Ndlozi said earlier this week. “We need to craft a new symbolism to remember and commemorate the colonial and apartheid past that is not based only on icons of white supremacy like Jan van Riebeeck and Paul Kruger but shows freedom fighters, black and white, who opposed it.”

Government officials have condemned the attacks on statues, and say a decision on their future will be taken only after consulting all groups.