Italians take to streets against the bombers: East wing of Uffizi expected to reopen in a month

'WHO WAS IT?' demanded banners held aloft by demonstrators as some 40,000 Florentines, joined by sympathetic tourists, streamed through the streets to attend a rally in protest at the car bomb that killed five people and severely damaged the Uffizi gallery.

As politicians, commentators, magistrates and experts aired their views, for many demonstrators the answer was clear. 'Assassins, it's always the state that kills people,' they chanted. 'Six people have died and only the state knows why,' other banners said. The death toll was revised downwards yesterday.

In Milan, a huge demonstration ended in front of the bank in Piazza Fontana. This was the scene of the first massacre, in 1969, of the 'strategy of tension' - a murky, unsolved terror campaign thought to have been engineered by politicians and 'deviant' secret service officers and clearly designed to drive public opinion to the right.

Florence police and carabinieri issued three pictures of men thought to be involved in the attack in which 200 kilogrammes of explosive placed in suitcases in a stolen white Fiat Fiorino van exploded in a narrow street by the gallery's west wing early on Thursday. One was of a dark man of about 30 with an unkempt beard and moustache seen parking the stolen van in the street by the gallery.

Another was a tall, sun-tanned man of about 25 seen jumping into a small car which collided with a parked vehicle then reversed out of a nearby street, tyres screeching, shortly after the explosion. A third, dark and beardless, was in the passenger seat.

Explosives experts said they had identified traces of a mixture similar to that used to blow up the Naples-Milan express in December 1984 killing 19 people, to murder the anti- Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife and bodyguards last year and the car bomb - in which no one was killed - in Rome two weeks ago.

The government yesterday earmarked 30bn lire (pounds 20m) for repairs to the building and its contents. Three less important paintings were destroyed and about 27 others, including a Madonna by Giotto, and three statues, were damaged by flying glass and debris.

The head of Florence fire brigade's fine arts team, Arcangelo Sepe Monti, said the east wing of the gallery - the most popular one that houses Botticellis, Giottos, Michelangelos and other great masterpieces - could be open within two weeks or a month.

The hotel where many of the scenes in the Merchant Ivory film Room with a View took place was devastated in the blast. The 90-year-old Hotel Quisisan is only a few yards away from where the car blew up. Its owner, Giovanella Nutini Marasco, said six of the 37 rooms had no roof, three had no walls, and the floors of the old reception rooms were seriously damaged.

Meanwhile, closed circuit television was being installed to guard the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and the area around it will be closed at night for fear that, if cultural terrorism continues, it could be the next target.

The Interior Minister, Nicola Mancino, repeated at cabinet and in parliament his theory that the Mafia was behind the bomb, but others suspected politicians desperate to prevent political change, Masonic conspirators and corrupted members of the secret services.

Sinister forces, page 10