On June 5, 1975, carabinieri intervened at the Cascina Spiotta farmhouse in the Alessandria countryside to liberate businessman Vittorio Vallarino Gancia, kidnapped the previous day by the Red Brigades. During the operation, a shootout broke out between the military and the BR cell. Carabiniere Giovanni D'Alfonso was killed, two other carabinieri were wounded, and BR member Mara Cagol, wife of Renato Curcio, also lost her life. Gancia was freed. Nearly fifty years later, the Court of Assize of Alessandria issued its ruling. Former Red Brigades member Lauro Azzolini was sentenced to six years of imprisonment, to be served in continuation with the sentence imposed by the Court of Assize of Rome on January 24, 1983, for the Moro kidnapping and the Via Fani massacre. For Renato Curcio and Mario Moretti, both historical leaders of the Red Brigades, the proceedings concluded with a declaration of prescription. The judges reclassified the charge, recognizing complicity in a crime different from the one originally hypothesized by the prosecution, a charge now time-barred. A fourth defendant, Pierluigi Zuffada, had already been acquitted in the preliminary hearing due to the statute of limitations on the charged offense. The prosecution had requested revocation of a 1987 ruling that had cleared Azzolini of the Cascina Spiotta events. Investigators believed Azzolini was the so-called "Mister X," the brigatist who escaped capture and was never identified. According to the prosecution, he authored an anonymous internal report of the organization on the Cascina Spiotta events, later recovered by investigators, and left fingerprint and palmprint evidence on the document. Zuffada was alleged to have been the courier who delivered the ransom request to the Gancia family's lawyer, while Curcio and Moretti were alleged to have organized the kidnapping as top leaders of the terrorist organization. The investigation combined historical documents with new technologies, including wiretaps, a trojan deployed on Azzolini, and drones used to map the Cascina Spiotta area. Renato Curcio had submitted a memorial arguing that, given the structure of Red Brigades cells in 1975, it was impossible to hypothesize his or others' involvement. According to Francesco Romeo, defense attorney for Mario Moretti, the ruling reduces the prosecution's case. The lawyer stated that Moretti was charged with moral complicity but had no role in the events and never wanted D'Alfonso's death, adding that in his view there were grounds for full acquittal, while acknowledging the decision as a step toward closure of that historical period. The son of carabiniere D'Alfonso had filed a complaint with the Piedmont DDA in December 2021, asking prosecutors to identify the brigatist who had escaped capture. The sentence closes one of the last remaining trials for terrorism-related events of the 1970s.