Rome---Italy debated Friday whether a deadly court shooting in which a man on trial for bankruptcy pulled out a gun and shot a judge and two others dead was a symptom of deeper social ills.
"I wanted revenge against those who ruined me," Claudio Giardiello, 57, told police who arrested him after the shooting in Milan on Thursday.
The other two dead were a lawyer and one of his co-defendants.
The attack shocked the country, with politicians and the victims' families demanding to know how it was possible for an armed man to get through court security, and judges linking the killing spree to a poisonous climate against the justice system.
The killings just streets away from the shopping quarter sparked immediate concerns over a breakdown in security in the city, which from May will host the 2015 Milan expo, an international event set to draw millions of visitors.
"The Expo city has shown the world it is -- at the heart of one of its nerve centres -- at the mercy of whoever plans in the next few months to spread terror," editorialist Gad Lerner wrote in La repubblica daily.
With fears of a possible attack by the Islamic State group fuelling the panic, critics warned Pope Francis's jubilee year, which will run from December 8 to November 20, 2016, was also a high-risk venture which could lure in militants.
"If blood can run even inside a court, defined as one of the most protected places, what could happen in a hospital? Or a school?" asked Michele Brambilla in La Stampa.
Judge Gherardo Colombo, one of the leading prosecutors in the Clean Hands investigations into political corruption in the 1990s, suggested "an anti-judiciary climate" may have fuelled Giardiello's decision to take the law into his own hands.
In a rare speech, President Sergio Mattarella called for more to be done to protect judges and "repel every form of disrepute towards magistrates, who are always on the front line and are particularly exposed."
AFP
