Carlo Soracchi – working for the Met as undercover spy cop ‘Carlo Neri’ [UCI]

ALLEGATIONS that a police officer encouraged a plot to firebomb a charity shop connected to a prominent Italian far-right leader is set to be probed at the “spy cops” inquiry next week, as a woman he proposed to while monitoring undercover gets to give evidence.

Carlo Soracchi, one of the Metropolitan Police’s notorious Special Demonstration Squad officers, went by the alias name and identity Carlo Neri during five years undercover monitoring anti-fascist activists at the No Platform group while living in Maida Vale.

During this time he had a two-year sexual relationship with Donna McLean in Shirland Road, proposing to her one New Year’s Eve despite having a wife and children in his real life.

The charity shop, also in Shirland Road, was linked to a prominent Italian neo fascist Roberto Fiore, who was at the time in this country and allied with the BNP leader Nick Griffin.

Fiore went on to lead protests against immigrants coming to the Lampedusa island off the southern tip of Italy, and later served as an MEP.

Before Christmas, No Platform activist Dan Gillman gave evidence to the inquiry about Soracchi.

He said Soracchi – who had pretended to be a Red Brigades revolutionary exiled from Italy – urged him and another activist Joe Batty to help him firebomb the charity shop in Maida Vale.

Soracchi claims it was all Gillman’s plan and they had gone with him to scout out the shop.

Last month Mr Gillman told the inquiry: “If you try to organise left-wing groups or anti-fascist groups, getting active enthusiastic people is a really hard thing to do.
“We had a really enthusiastic, keen young man wanting to help and get involved, so you want to nurture that, you want to go with that.”

Later he added: “I have always defended democracy. I have not firebombed it, like Carlo tried to make us do. It is a different democracy to what Carlo believes in.

“It is a democracy where we defend families of colour who want to go out on the streets, rather than defending the fascists when they goose-step up and down Whitehall. It is a democracy where we arrest the fascists. We don’t arrest a thousand old ladies who are in Palestine Action T-shirts.”

Mr Gillman – a history teacher – has also argued that he became “blacklisted” based on information passed to the notorious Consulting Association by the SDS.

Mr Batty is due to give evidence next week about the charity shop plot.

Soracchi later became the chief steward of No Platform while filing reports on the group’s activities. But this Met officer’s deception would reach far greater heights.

He had a two-year sexual relationship with Donna McLean and proposed to her on the same night he allegedly invited Gillman and Batty to burn down the charity shop.

Back in 2016, the Met had said the Neri case “would be subject to the most intense scrutiny” at the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

A decade later, the witnesses are only now preparing for that moment.

In 2023 Ms McLean published a book about her experience, Small Town Girl: Love, Lies and the Undercover Police.

Due to give evidence to the inquiry later this month, she has written of “painful wounds, which never quite healed”.