Ex-Northern League official guilty of Kyenge monkey post

(ANSA) - Brescia, April 17 - A former official with the anti-immigrant Northern League was sentenced to two months in jail Thursday for aggravated defamation after he posted a photo of former integration minister Cecile Kyenge with a picture of a monkey on Facebook.
    Agostino Pedrali, who had been a League commissioner for social services in the city of Coccaglio, near Brescia in northeastern Italy, was charged over a posting on the social media site last July that put the two photos together with the caption "separated at birth".
    He was forced to resign a few days later amidst an outcry over the post, one of numerous racial attacks on the Congo-born Kyenge - Italy's first black cabinet minister - that most often came from the Northern League.
    Pedrali later said the Facebook post was a "clumsy attempt" to diffuse tension over other incidents involving Kyenge.
    Following the court ruling, organized labour and human rights groups expressed satisfaction with the sentence, saying the court showed sensitivity and took action to try to protect human rights.
    Kyenge last year called the repeated attacks by the League "intolerable" and demanded the party's national chief, Lombardy Governor Roberto Maroni, do something to put an end to them.
    Other League members posted photos on Facebook and used television ads to compare Kyenge to a gorilla, copying one of the most egregious attacks from Senator Roberto Calderoli who compared her to an orangutan.
    Calderoli defended his comments as a "joke", triggering numerous copycat slurs.
    In another incident, mannequins smeared with blood-red paint and anti-immigrant messages were found in the town of Cervia just as Kyenge arrived there for political meetings where someone in the audience threw a banana in reference to the slurs.