The case of Alfredo Cospito, an anarchist leader who has been imprisoned on a hunger strike for a hundred days, is shaking Italy. The Italian government has denounced the incidents of recent days related to the detainee, including two vandal attacks against the Italian diplomatic headquarters in Berlin and Barcelona, and also a violent protest that took place on Saturday in Rome that ended with 40 people arrested.
Cospito, 55, is sentenced to twenty years in prison for an attack committed in 2006 and has been on a hunger strike for 103 days to protest the strict solitary confinement 41 bis, created for the most dangerous gangsters, to which he is subjected. since May of last year. His health conditions have worsened in recent days, so the detainee, who has gone from weighing 100 kilos to 72, has been transferred from the Sardinian prison in Sassari to another prison in Milan where there is a clinical center that could be needed in case of emergency.
His lawyers demand that the 41 Bis isolation status be revoked, under which the inmates have no contact with other prisoners and can only speak with their families in exceptional cases. But the Italian Interior Minister, Matteo Piantedosi, refuses, alleging that he is a "dangerous character" due to the attack, considered terrorist. The explosions, carried out with home-made bombs in front of a police school in Turin, did not cause casualties. He was also convicted of shooting the director of a nuclear power company in Genoa in 2012.
In Barcelona, unknown individuals broke into a consulate building, breaking a window and graffitiing a mural by Subirachs that read "murderous Italian state" and "Cospito freedom." In Berlin, the car of the first counselor of the Italian embassy was set on fire, the same thing that happened in Athens a month ago. And this weekend, in Turin, an electrical repeater that appeared with the inscription “Cospito out” was burned, while in Rome a police officer was injured during the violent support protest in the Trastevere neighborhood.
"I believe that the State should not be intimidated by those who think of threatening its officials," Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on Monday. Her government already issued a statement yesterday assuring that the attacks carried out against the diplomatic headquarters in Athens, Barcelona and Berlin, in addition to the attack in Turin or the "violence" in cities such as Rome or Trento, "will not intimidate the institutions." “And less if the objective is to soften the harshest detention regime for those responsible for terrorist acts. The State does not make an agreement with whom it threatens”, read the note.
