Former cabinet minister Claudio
Scajola and ex-police chief Gianni De Gennaro have been included
in an investigation into circumstances around the death of civil
servant Marco Biagi, killed by the Red Brigades in Bologna on
March 19, 2002, sources told ANSA Thursday.
Scajola and De Gennaro were interior minister and national
chief of police respectively at the time Biagi, a labour
ministry aide, was gunned down by the leftwing terrorist group
after being denied a police escort by Scajola.
De Gennaro is now chairman for aerospace and defence giant
Finmeccanica.
The investigation, which began last May, initially named no
suspects but now the two officials are being probed on
allegations of negligent manslaughter.
An earlier probe had been shelved but new interior ministry
documents, including notes by Scajola's former secretary Luciano
Zocchi, led investigators to reopen the case last year, sources
said.
Zocchi said that if mistakes were made, it was by accident
and not intentionally.
"I told the judges everything I know," he said.
Prosecutors have identified injured parties as Biagi's
widow Marina Orlandi, their two children, and his sister, as
well as the Italian cabinet and the interior ministry.
Sources said the documents that led to the reopening of the
Biagi case were seized as part of a separate probe into
allegations that Scajola helped a Mafia-linked fugitive former
MP.
That probe led to the arrest last May of Scajola, a member
of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right Forza Italia (FI)
party.
Scajola was later released.
There have been reports Scajola may have received a letter
from an MP warning that Biagi was in danger.
Scajola was forced to resign as interior minister in July
2002 after sparking controversy by saying Biagi had been a "pain
in the a**e" and that if he had been given a security escort
"three people would have been killed instead of one".
Scajola also served as government-program minister from
2003 to 2005 and industry minister from 2008 to 2010 under two
separate Berlusconi governments.
He was forced to resign as industry minister in 2010 as a
result of a scandal about a shady real estate deal involving an
expensive home with a view on Rome's iconic Colosseum.
But in January 2014, a judge acquitted Scajola in that
case, saying his assertion that businessman Diego Anemone had
paid for most of the flat for him without his knowledge was
credible.
Prosecutors are appealing that acquittal.
Last May, Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said the
government had not known how to protect Biagi.
"Security detail management is always difficult," said
Alfano.
"If there are too many, people are outraged, if they are
too few, you put people at risk. Giovanni Falcone (a Palermo
prosecutor assassinated by the Sicilian Mafia in 1992) said that
the Mafia kills the men that institutions do not know how to
protect, and we did not know how to protect Marco Biagi".
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