Did Italian government's inaction enable 1982 terrorist attack on Rome synagogue?

The Italian government launched a probe into documents published two weeks ago that allege authorities turned a blind eye on Palestinian terror attacks against Jews, including the deadly 1982 attack on the Great Synagogue of Rome, Italian daily La Repubblica reported last week.

The documents revealed that the Italian government made an agreement with the Palestinian Liberation Organization as early as the 1970s to ignore attacks on Jewish targets as long as non-Jewish areas in Italy and Italian assets abroad were unharmed.

Papers also showed that Italian intelligence had prior information about the PLO's planned attack on the Rome synagogue – in which a toddler was killed and 37 people were injured – but did not stop it.

"Thirty-nine years later, the time has come for us to hear the truth," Enrico Borghi, a member of the Italian Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic told La Repubblica on Thursday

"A state must fully come to terms with its own history," he said.

On Oct. 9, 1982, on the Simchat Torah holiday, several armed attackers threw hand grenades at the worshippers who began exiting the synagogue after services and sprayed the crowd with sub-machine gunfire.

The documents revealed that Italian internal intelligence warned the government several times that Palestinians were planning to attack Jewish targets in Rome, with the synagogue at the top of the list of possible targets.

Another warning sent to the Italian Interior Ministry cited a "usually reliable source" saying the PLO's Abu Nidal group was planning an attack during the High Holidays.

However, despite the warnings, the security around the Jewish sites was not increased. In fact, documents revealed that on the day of the attack, the police vehicle that was usually stationed outside the synagogue during holidays was absent.

The attack occurred several months after the beginning of the 1982 Lebanon War, and a few weeks after then-Chairman of PLO Yasser Arafat visited Italy.