30 Years in Prison

"I carried a revolver charged with poisoned dumdum bullets and also a hand grenade which I had saved from the War. I intended either to shoot Mussolini or to bomb him, whichever seemed surest of success. ... I told none of my friends. I had no accomplices. I just threw the bomb. I knew that if it killed Mussolini I should be killed. ... I am sorry the bomb only wounded a lot of men in the street. . . . My temperament has always been profoundly misogynistic [woman-hating]. . . ."

Such were words spoken at Rome last week by Gino Lucetti, a youth whose bomb glanced harmlessly off the limousine of Signor Benito Mussolini (TIME, Sept. 20), as the Premier was motoring slowly toward his office in the Palazzo Chigi, Rome. Signer Lucetti, some six feet tall, but with refined, sensitive features, confessed last week in a detached monotone. Spectators noted that he had thrust sockless feet into a pair of battered shoes, wore unpressed duck trousers, a collarless shirt, a saggy coat.

"Why did you attempt the life of Signor Mussolini?"

"Ah," said Gino Lucetti, almost dreamily, "I had a conviction that he ought to be suppressed."

The Court, a special military tribunal, sentenced Signor Lucetti to 30 years' imprisonment. Although he maintained to the last that he had had no accomplices, the Court sentenced two men who were at least his intimates to terms of 18 and 20 years.