AS2 (High Security 2)

Italy: An update and some considerations on Operation Sibilla and the 41 bis against anarchist Alfredo Cospito

Posted on 2022/06/25 - 2022/07/24 by darknights

A hearing on the precautionary measures ordered for the repressive Sibilla operation was held at the Court of Cassation in Rome on June 22. The hearing stemmed from an appeal by prosecutor Manuela Comodi against the order of the Perugia review court, which on Dec. 16 had resulted in the annulment of the precautionary measures taken on Nov. 11 in the repressive operation. The Court of Cassation, in spite of the opinion of the Attorney General’s Office (which had called for the rejection of the Perugia prosecutor’s appeal), granted PM Comodi’s request, annulling the order of the review court and ordering a new hearing. The precautionary measures are not effective, and a new review hearing will be ordered for the coming months at the Perugia court.

We would like to take the opportunity of this update to dwell on the reasons that led to the crackdown, adding some of our own considerations derived especially from the recent order to transfer Comrade Alfredo Cospito to a 41 bis detention regime.

In September 2021, following years of investigations conducted by the commands of the Special Operational Grouping of the Carabinieri in Milan and Perugia, eight prison arrests for as many anarchist comrades were requested by the Perugia prosecutor’s office. This order was partly rejected and downgraded by the judge for preliminary investigations. At the same time as this request for arrest, a three-month censure order on correspondence was ordered for comrade Alfredo Cospito, which was subsequently renewed several times.

Thus, on Nov. 11, dozens of searches were carried out by the ROS of the Carabinieri, the Sibilla investigation concerning some 15 comrades was notified, and six precautionary measures were imposed in connection with the charge of incitement to commit a crime with the aggravating factor of the purpose of terrorism: an arrest warrant in prison for Alfredo Cospito (at the time already imprisoned in the Terni jail); the arrest of comrade Michele Fabiani, who was placed under house arrest with all restrictions; and finally, the obligation to stay in the municipality of residence jointly with the obligation to sign three days a week for four comrades. On the very day of the operation, two websites (roundrobin.info and malacoda.noblogs.org) were also blacked out, making their online addresses untraceable, and at present they are still unreachable on Italian territory through conventional browsers (due to technical limitations, the repressive forces were able to order the blackout only in Italy, since it was not possible to completely eliminate the websites in question). As mentioned earlier, after a little over a month, the precautionary measures were all cancelled by the review court. Continue reading “Italy: An update and some considerations on Operation Sibilla and the 41 bis against anarchist Alfredo Cospito” →

Italy: Statement of Juan Sorroche in front of the court of Treviso and against the telematization of the democratic inquisition.

Posted on 2022/06/18 - 2022/06/18 by darknights

In this umpteenth hearing in videoconference and after many requests, all denied, to appear and attend in person and not in absence to all the hearings of the trial that sees me charged, for the heavy and infamous accusation of massacre, I have to face the issue of videoconferencing, which enters, or to be more precise, was entering, in the infamous logic of the differentiation of the penitentiary circuits, in which the individual prisoner and accused is demonized and dehumanized by the said “considerable social dangerousness”. And I said that I was entering, because the videoconference, the trial in absentia, has been extended to all the prisoners in Italian prisons, who have been left without a real defense and with the marginalization that all this implies for all the defendants who suffer this imposition, through a liberticidal dynamic of the umpteenth emergency, this time for the Covid-19 emergency, which then became law. It is known, it is already evident and unmasked – and I am not only talking about the contradiction of this problem especially, or of one law or another – how the specific problem of the videoconference has reduced the defense to be a farce, annulling in fact the defendant within the trial.

This court will probably say that this has nothing to do with the trial taking place today.

But I believe it does, and what is more, I believe it is a fundamental issue. I am talking about the contradiction that the States possess by their own systemic nature, the fundamental problem is the disintegration and degeneration that dresses itself as emergentialism, and has the objective of breaking and directing the consolidated and ordinary legality at will, transforming it into another legality. We see it with the same dynamics of the perpetual emergency, and the specific plan of the videoconference is only an example of how the systemic authoritarianism liberticidal system expands in a capillary way. It is the exception, the emergency of today, that forges the law of tomorrow, reducing it more and more. The trials by videoconference, that is, in absentia, have been established by the continuous emergencies within the said social dangerousness, which is already the norm, such as the trial by videoconference for all the prisoners in Italian prisons. And it is not that this does not have repercussions on the real conditions of the entire trial, since it hinders the management of a real defense of the accused, creating a contradiction with what your own democratic and bourgeois law argues. Continue reading “Italy: Statement of Juan Sorroche in front of the court of Treviso and against the telematization of the democratic inquisition.” →

Solidarity Poster: Solidarity with Alfredo Cospito, anarchist imprisoned in 41 bis. (Italy)

Posted on 2022/05/21 - 2022/05/21 by darknights

On May 5, imprisoned anarchist Alfredo Cospito was notified of his transfer from “High Security 2” to 41 bis. The decree was ordered by Justice Minister Marta Cartabia. The 41 bis is an afflictive penitentiary regime that provides for: isolation and silence, the absence of sociability and any internal activity, censorship of correspondence and the blocking of a good part of it, one hour of monthly interview with the dividing glass, recording of the interview itself, ten minutes of phone calls per month with an authorized and forced family member from a barracks, the prohibition to receive and buy newspapers and books, and the limitation in the availability of objects inside the cell.

This transfer is an attack on a comrade anarchist who never lowered his head: who, after his arrest and in the trial that followed, claimed head-on to have shot in the legs the CEO of Ansaldo Nucleare, Engineer Adinolfi, one of the top nuclear executives in Europe. In recent years, Alfredo has been a thorn in the side for investigators because of his constant contribution to the revolutionary movement, a contribution they would now like to silence. Continue reading “Solidarity Poster: Solidarity with Alfredo Cospito, anarchist imprisoned in 41 bis. (Italy)” →

Rome, Italy: For an international revolutionary solidarity

Posted on 2022/05/21 - 2022/05/21 by darknights

“…I think that the new can only come from their collision (of anarchist terrorism and creative anarchy), because life is contrast: rational and irrational, hate and love, everything but the mortal, static “balance”. Harmony is the daughter of “imbalance”, of chaos. “*

Well, what has been hovering for a while has finally manifested itself: on May 5, the anarchist comrade Alfredo Cospito, already detained in the AS2 section [High Security 2; Att.Nt) of the Terni prison, received the notification of the application of the 41 bis against him.
This detention regime, requested by the judges and approved by the Ministry of Justice, with the signature of the Minister Marta Cartabia, as we know, involves: the annihilation of the individual, an extension of the isolation, the deprivation of books, the lack of information and news from the outside world… in short, torture. Continue reading “Rome, Italy: For an international revolutionary solidarity” →

Italy: Against 41 bis, revolutionary solidarity with anarchist Alfredo Cospito

Posted on 2022/05/09 - 2022/11/16 by darknights

Thursday, May 5, the imprisoned anarchist Alfredo Cospito received notification of the provision against him of the penitentiary regime of 41 bis. At the moment Alfredo is still detained in the prison of Terni, in the dedicated section. We do not know if this is a provisional destination and if it will be followed by a transfer to another institute. The decree has been ordered, as foreseen by the law, directly by the Minister of Justice Marta Cartabia, former president of the Constitutional Court. Let us recall, very briefly, that 41 bis is a particularly afflictive penitentiary regime, which provides, in order to prevent any form of communication, isolation, absence of sociability and any internal activity, silence, censorship of correspondence, one hour of monthly meetings with the glass partition and the “intercom”, then the recording of the meeting itself, 10 minutes of phone calls per month with an authorized family member forced to call from inside a Carabinieri barracks. Inmates are forbidden to receive newspapers and books, most correspondence is blocked in advance because of its contents, moreover, it is not possible to buy newspapers and there is a strong limitation in the availability of objects inside the cell (books, clothes, food, paper and pen are limited).

It is not the first time that such a measure is applied to revolutionaries, in 2006 four prisoners of Brigate Rosse were interned in such facilities (one of them, Diana Blefari, committed suicide in October 2009, shortly after being declassified from 41 bis). This is a precedent that, despite the mobilizations, has not yet been disarticulated.

In these first hours of anger, we must dwell on two issues.

On the one hand, we note the personal, physical attack on an anarchist comrade who in these ten years has never lowered his head: a comrade who claimed to have shot in the legs the CEO of Ansaldo Nucleare, Mr Adinolfi. The fact that Alfredo could not be isolated and his revolutionary contribution silenced was a thorn in the side for investigators. This has led in recent years to further restrictive measures against him, such as the censorship of correspondence and the serving of an arrest warrant in prison for Operation Sibilla on November 11, through which the repressive forces have attempted to remove from circulation a newspaper and publications that over the years have reported the articles and contributions of the comrade. We must make Alfredo feel the solidarity of a movement that is not tamed, that has not forgotten him, that does not leave him alone; we must make sure that this solidarity breaks the bans and breaks the isolation. Continue reading “Italy: Against 41 bis, revolutionary solidarity with anarchist Alfredo Cospito” →

Italy: Censorship of correspondence for anarchist Alfredo Cospito extended again (March 2022)

Posted on 2022/03/26 by darknights

We inform that in the middle of March the censorship of correspondence (incoming and outgoing) for anarchist comrade Alfredo Cospito, currently imprisoned in section AS2 (“High Security 2”) of Terni prison, was renewed once again. The censorship will last three months, until June. The measure had also been ordered between September and December 2021 and between December 2021 and March of this year.

We remind that the comrade, arrested in September 2012, already sentenced to 9 years and 5 months for the wounding of Adinolfi (CEO of Ansaldo Nucleare), was sentenced to a further 20 years in the “Scripta Manent” trial held in Turin, whose court of cassation hearing will be held on May 25 in Rome. In addition, the comrade has recently received an arrest order for the “Sibilla” operation of November 11, as he is accused of incitement to commit crimes with the aggravating circumstance of the purpose of terrorism, in relation with the publication of the anarchist paper “Vetriolo”. The arrest order was subsequently annulled by the Perugia re-examination court on December 16, while the investigation remains open.

Let’s break the isolation: revolutionary solidarity with the imprisoned anarchists.

The address of the comrade:

Alfredo Cospito
Casa Circondariale di Terni
strada delle Campore 32
05100 Terni (Italy)