I return briefly to the Propagande Due (P2) in Italy. When its existence was discovered, the Italian society was shaken to the core. Politicians, journalists, the heads of all three Italian intelligence services... all members of the P2!

But what about Elio Ciolini? The mysterious P2 member who was so closely connected with the gang. Was Ciolini an unimportant member of this organization, or someone more significant?

This is what Gen. Nino Lugaresi, who was appointed head of SISMI (Italian Military Intelligence) after P2 was discovered, said about him:

'Ciolini is one of the most brilliant members of Gelli's [the head of the P2] staff (...) for the most part Ciolini's entire activity seemed to me a successful cover-up activity, implemented to paralyze the investigations on the Bologna massacre.'

85 people were killed in the terrorist bombing at Bologna railway station in 1980.

Lugaresi added

'Only the existence of some sort of connection between the authors of the massacre and the authors of the cover-up can explain such a behavior.'

(For people that read Italian, this article  about Ciolini is very interesting.)

Just think about it. Ciolini was a key P2 member who, according to the head of SISMI, played a key role in the Bologna massacre and/or its cover up. And he turns up in Brussels, living with the grandmother of a Haemers gang member!

He arranged training camps for gang members near the French-Spanish border. And immediately after the gang members committed their bloody hold-ups (one security guard was blown to bits, his brains quite literally coating the inside of the vehicle after the gang detonated the security van door with high explosives) they handed the money over to Ciolini.

The Haemers Gang were notorious even before they kidnapped Belgium's ex-Prime Minister. You would imagine, therefore, that all this would be a major scoop for any Belgian journalist that discovered this.

But you would be wrong.

You won't read about any of this in the Belgian media. The subject is taboo. But a few Belgian journalists know all about this. One of them is Douglas De Coninck of De Morgen. De Coninck knows because Haemers investigator Patrick Van Brussel trusted him.

Another was Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck. But these journalists stayed completely silent on Ciolini, the P2 and any subject that suggested that the Haemers Gang were anything other than ordinary gangsters.