On May 10 last, the trial of the “Prometeo” trial began, in which the anarchist comrades Natascia, Beppe and Robert are accused of sending three parcel bombs to the former director of the DAP (Dipartimento dell’Amministrazione Penitenziaria, “Department of Penitentiary Administration”), Santi Consolo, and two prosecutors of Turin, Roberto Sparagna and Antonio Rinaudo. The trial is taking place in front of the court of assizes of Genoa, as the indictment (article 280, paragraph 1 and paragraph 3) foresees a sentence starting from 20 years imprisonment. The trial was held by videoconference for the two comrades still locked up, Natascia and Beppe, who “attended” the hearings through a screen from the prisons of Santa Maria Capua Vetere and Bologna respectively. The trial followed a schedule of two hearings a week from May 10 to June 2, and saw a considerable number of carabinieri from the ROS (Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale, “Special Operational Grouping”) and experts from the RIS (Reparto Investigazioni Scientifiche, “Scientific Investigations Department”) summoned as witnesses by the prosecution, represented by prosecutor Federico Manotti and by the civil plaintiff who appeared for Rinaudo.
The core of the prosecution’s case revolves around the testimony of ROS General Bogliacino of Turin, which lasted two full days and, rather than talking about specific facts, focused mostly on ideological issues related to the accused comrades in the trial, on their interpersonal relationships and their correspondence with some prisoners, on internet searches dating back to 2012 (!) and related to news and public discussions and on everyday dialogues instrumentally exhumed to reach forced conclusions. The same script used in similar trials for other comrades: after all, the suggestion assumes a fundamental role in a trial against anarchists, even more so if you are in front of a popular jury. For this reason, many words were also spent on friendly relations with a comrade who in the past was arrested on charges of terrorism and possession of alleged explosive material, and in this wake the ROS have then evoked the solidarity with the defendants in the Scripta Manent trial and that directed to another prisoner, to justify in this way the motives and aversions to those who are the offended parties in this process, the DAP and two prosecutors involved in the repression of the struggles and not only. As if the same aversion was not shared by almost every rebel, anarchist, antagonist, or criminal by necessity or virtue.
The same RIS experts were not so convinced of the lethality of the parcel bombs in question, and the witness who tried to appear more credible clung to unspecified “experiments carried out by himself in private”, experiments which, moreover, he did not even expose in the trial in order to demonstrate lethality.
The civil party then appointed its own list of witnesses to bring to the courtroom, all of the same tenor as those mentioned above, and then brought Rinaudo and his wife in person to the courtroom to narrate their fate as persons persecuted by the dangerous antagonist environments, moreover contradicting themselves on the dates of some alleged intimidations. Continue reading “Prometeo Operation: Updates On the Ongoing Trial in Genoa (Italy, May–July 2021)”