The first attack occurred in the middle of the night on December 2 and was aimed at the First Counselor of the Italian Embassy in Athens, the Greek capital, Susanna Schlein (sister of the candidate for General Secretary of the Democratic Party of Italy, Elly Schlein). ). . At 4 a.m. (an hour less in mainland Spain), some “unknowns” set fire to a car parked in front of a residential building in the Papagu district, according to police. It was from the Italian diplomat. The attack was later attributed to a Hellenic anarchist group protesting the so-called Alfredo case, an activist of the same ideology who was convicted in Italy and went on a hunger strike for the prison regime he was subjected to. Two more attacks on the devastated consular headquarters in Barcelona and on the car of the first counselor at the Italian embassy in Berlin, Luigi Estero, have sounded the alarm in Italy.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni expressed concern in a public statement from her press office earlier this morning: “The government is following with concern and attention these new cases of violence against our officials and diplomatic representatives.” For his part, Italian Vice President and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani gave further details of the attack in Barcelona in a statement calling for “a clear light” on the “dynamics of these acts”. “Yesterday afternoon [por el viernes] Unknown persons smashed the window of the building housing the Consulate General in Barcelona and defaced a wall at the entrance of the building,” Tajani explained. In the case of the First Counselor in Berlin, his car caught fire.
The door of an Italian diplomat’s home in Athens, in front of which his car was vandalized on December 2, 2022. Lefteris Pitarakis (AP)
Alfredo Cospito, an anarchist jailed since 2014, has been imprisoned for nearly a year in the 41-bis regime devised by judge Giovanni Falcone during the organization’s bloodiest era to fight the Mafia. However, the method is sometimes applied to other types of prisoners, prompting heated debate about the constitutional and legal limitations of the measure. Indeed, on October 20, Alfredo Cospito went on a hunger strike in protest. “I know I will die if they don’t solve this problem. It will be my last fight but I will continue anyway. I only have this weapon, I only have my body,” the leader of the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI) assured to the Democratic Party (PD) deputies who went to jail to check his health, La Republik newspaper revealed.
The militant anarchist was sentenced to his first prison term of 10 years and eight months in 2014 on charges of shooting Roberto Adinolfi, general director of the Ansaldo Nucleare group, in the legs two years earlier. Cospito was also accused of placing two packet bombs in front of the Carabinieri Officers School in Fossano, in the Cuneo area, on the night of June 2-3, 2006, while he was already in prison hours apart and carried out with home-made bombs, caused no deaths or injuries and Cospito always maintained that it was a protest attack and that he had no intention of hurting or killing anyone.
This second conviction cost him an additional 20 years in prison for a crime of “massacre against public safety.” However, the Supreme Court later revised the classification of the crime and sentence, commuting it to a “massacre against state security” carrying a sentence of life imprisonment with no possibility of reduction. After more than nine years in prison, Alfredo Cospito was transferred to the 41-bis regime.
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