Besieged by the problems in the Italian recovery plan and by the inflammatory declarations of its ministers –one of them, the Agriculture Minister, this week rescued the theory of “ethnic substitution”–, the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, has not A good week has passed to celebrate six months in power. Another piece of news that has gone unnoticed will not have left you indifferent: Alfredo Cospito, the anarchist prisoner who took a stand against the State, has interrupted his hunger strike after six months in protest against the harsh regime of prison isolation.
Alfredo Cospito, 55, is sentenced to twenty years in prison for an attack and had been on a hunger strike since October 20 against the strict 41 Bis isolation regime, created for the most dangerous gangsters, to which he has been subjected since the last year. His health conditions have worsened to the point of losing 50 kilos and being forced to be admitted since the beginning of March at the San Paolo hospital in Milan. In fact, he was transferred from the Sardinian prison of Sassari to another Milanese center with the availability of a necessary clinical space in case of emergency, as he ended up being.
The decision, their lawyers have argued, comes after the Constitutional Court sided with the prisoner and considered it illegitimate not to take into account eventual extenuating factors for one of the cases for which he is serving a sentence, the 2006 attack against a police school. in Fossano, in Piedmont, with home-made bombs that did not cause fatalities. He was also sentenced to nine years in prison for shooting the director of a nuclear power company in Genoa in 2012.
Cospito entered the harsh 41 Bis prison regime in May 2022. Under these conditions, criticized by humanitarian organizations, the prisoners live completely isolated. They do not have access to common areas and books and magazines are limited. Only in some specific cases are they allowed to walk for two hours in the open air, watched over by agents. In some cases they may receive one visit per month from relatives, but separated by a glass, and their correspondence is reviewed. The objective is that the gangsters can no longer carry the reins of their clans.
Cospito's case, and his protest, motivated an enormous debate about these prison conditions to which more than 700 people are subjected, almost half sentenced to life imprisonment. Four of them – like the anarchist leader – live it not because they belong to organized crime, but on the basis of anti-terrorism. The other three belonged to the Red Brigades. “The problem with 41 Bis is that it was born as an exceptional measure that was to last a few years, but in 2002 it became an effective regime with the purpose of interrupting communications between subjects of various organizations inside prisons. For those who do not have a life sentence, it can be absurd because it is possible for a person to be sentenced for ten years under this regime and then return to the street”, says Mauro Palma, guarantor of the detainees in Italy.
At the end of February, the Supreme Court decided to keep him in solitary confinement, against the appeal of his lawyers, and in line with the thought of the Meloni Minister of Justice, the former magistrate Carlo Nordio, who considered him "socially dangerous" and who has made it very clear that 41 Bis “does not touch”. The protests of his followers gave much to talk about, with several anarchist attacks that reached the Italian consulate in Barcelona. The assailants broke into a building breaking a window and painted a mural by Subirachs that read "A murderous Italian state" and "Libertad Cospito."
The security forces were especially alert in the event that Cospito, who in recent days had already loosened his hunger strike and had begun to drink milk, could become a martyr for anarchism. In Berlin, the car of the first counselor of the Italian embassy was set on fire, the same thing that already happened in Athens in December, where the target was the diplomatic sister of the current leader of the Italian Democratic Party, Elly Schlein. The heated discussion reached Parliament, where the opposition demanded the resignation of Brothers of Italy deputy Giovanni Donzelli, vice president of the committee that controls intelligence services, for revealing confidential information by declaring that the mafia was using Cospito to free hundreds bosses of the strict prison regime and that the anarchist had held talks with mafia bosses.
