Woman decapitated as femicides flare in Italy

(ANSA) - Rome, August 25 - Violence against women made a grisly comeback to Italian headlines Monday as police shot and killed a knife-wielding man who decapitated a woman in a villa in a posh neighbourhood of Rome.
    Police said 35-year-old Federico Leonelli appeared garbed in army pants, black boots, a green shirt and a gardening mask, and proceeded to threaten them with a large, bloodied kitchen knife before they shot him down.
    The victim is Oksana Matsiuk, a Ukranian domestic worker in a villa in the EUR suburb of Rome. The motive is still unknown. The owner of the villa said Leonelli, a colleague at a computer company, had been a houseguest for two months. In a town near the southern city of Caserta, a 58-year.old man turned himself in after he attacked his wife with a baseball bat, bashing her to within an inch of her life, sending her to hospital in critical condition.
    In the Calabria town of Lamezia Terme, Pasquale Gagliardi fled after stabbing his Polish wife of 16 years and the mother of his two children, in the chest. The victim is hospitalized in stable condition, police said.
    Also in Calabria, a man who shot his wife to death on August 18 has turned himself in after a week on the lam. Giuseppe Pilato, 30, fatally shot his wife Mary Cirillo, 31, at the height of an argument. The couple had four children. "I don't recall," he reportedly answered prosecutors, who booked him on charges of first-degree murder and illegal weapons possession.
    "Violence against women will never take a holiday, but neither will our perseverance in fighting it," the director of the Padova-based Veneto Center Women's Project told ANSA.
    "In this key month, in which the Istanbul Convention to combat violence against women has gone into effect, unfortunately domestic violence has continued unabated".
    The so-called Istanbul Convention is the first European treaty specifically targeting violence against women and domestic violence, and was signed on August 1 by 36 of 47 Council of Europe member States.
    Another 14 countries, including Italy and Turkey, also ratified it.
    In Italy, violence against women has racked up 17 billion euros a year in direct and indirect costs, according to a study by development NGO Intervita based on data from Istat national statistics agency as well as interviews with victims, counselors, and other service providers.