2004: Fabrizio Quattrocchi, “I’ll show you how an Italian dies!”
Add comment April 14th, 2018 Headsman
On this date in 2004, Italian mercenary Fabrizio Quattrocchi was executed by Iraqi insurgents.
A former Italian army corporal turned baker, Quattrocchi (English Wikipedia entry | the vastly more detailed Italian) hired on with an American contractor in the Iraq fiasco as a private security guard at €8,000 per month, intending to save enough to start a family.
Instead, Quattrocchi was seized as a hostage outside Baghdad with three comrades on April 13, 2004, by the “Green Brigades,” one of that era’s many ephemeral bodies of militants. The other three* were held (and eventually freed unharmed via a June 2004 special forces raid) further to an unsuccessful ultimatum demanding Italian withdrawal. Quattrocchi, by contrast, was executed the very next day after capture — seemingly to prove that the kidnappers meant business after Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi greeted news of the men’s capture with a vow that he would never give in to “blackmail.”
A video of the murder was delivered to Al Jazeera TV, which has never aired it in its entirety. However, it became known via second-hand reports of those who had viewed it, and eventually from a partial airing of the video, that just prior to being shot Quattrocchi spat defiant last words to his executioners:
From the London Times, April 16, 2004.
Then he was shot dead,** and dumped in the grave he’d been forced to dig for himself.
Thanks to these last words, which Berlusconi and his foreign minister Franco Frattini immediately pinned to a bloody banner, Quattrocchi’s memory has been the subject of partisan rancor in Italy. The left has disdained to celebrate a gun for hire in a disastrous imperial foray; the right has honored his patriotism and conferred a medal of valor upon him in 2006 — arousing some protest since this recognition has not been extended to regular Italian soldiers who fell to terrorist attacks in Iraq, nor to less bellicose murdered hostages like Enzo Baldoni.
* The other captives were Salvatore Stefio, Maurizio Agliana, and Umberto Cupertino, all like Quattrocchi Italians in their mid-thirties. Stefio would later be prosecuted and acquitted for unauthorized recruitment of security contractors.
** About a month after Quattrocchi was slain by gunfire, the grisly beheading of hostage Nick Berg inaugurated a different epoch in Iraq’s stagey hostage murders.
On this day..
- 1974: Marc Filloux and Manivanh, journalists - 2020
- 1683: John Nisbet the Younger - 2019
- 2015: Siti Zainab - 2017
- 1725: Maria Romberg, her lover, her maid, and her witch - 2016
- 1322: Bartholomew de Badlesmere - 2015
- 1922: George Hornsby - 2014
- 1950: Eugene LaMoore, the last hanged in Alaska - 2013
- Themed Set: Alaska - 2013
- 1736: Andrew Wilson, in the Heart of Midlothian - 2012
- 1647: Domenica Gratiadei and her coven of witches - 2011
- 1965: Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, In Cold Blood subjects - 2010
- 1865: Not George S.E. Vaughn - 2009
- 1682: Avvakum Petrov, Old Believer - 2008
Entry Filed under: 21st Century,Borderline "Executions",Execution,Famous Last Words,History,Hostages,Iraq,Italy,No Formal Charge,Occupation and Colonialism,Popular Culture,Shot,Soldiers,Wartime Executions
Tags: 2000s, 2004, april 14, fabrizio quattrocchi, iraq war, politics, silvio berlusconi
Recent Comments