Our duty to guarantee Cospito health care - Delmastro

(ANSA) - ROME, FEB 7 - Justice Undersecretary Andrea Delmastro Delle Vedove said Tuesday that it was the State's duty to ensure that jailed anarchist Alfredo Cospito, who has been on hunger strike for over 100 days to protest against the tough 41 bis jail regime he is being held under, gets the best possible medical treatment.
    "It's our duty to guarantee him the best health conditions (possible) and, if necessary, move him to a clinic in the case in which his conditions deteriorate," Delmastro said after visiting a Perugia prison. Cospito is in a healthcare facility in Milan's Opera Prison.
    "Cospito is being monitored and so healthcare is being constantly provided to him".
    The 41 bis is normally reserved just for mafia bosses and Cospito is campaigning to get the regime lifted for all inmates, including mobsters.
    Anarchists have staged protests and acts of vandalism in Italy and abroad in support of Cospito and there were big rallies in Rome and Milan at the weekend in which demonstrators clashed with police and some were arrested.
    The case is also at the centre of a huge political row in which Delmastro is a lead player.
    This row broke out when Giovanni Donzelli, Delmastro's flat mate and fellow lawmaker for Premier Giorgia Meloni's right-wing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, revealed in the Lower House last week that Cospito had talked to mafia bosses about getting the 41 bis abolished and that four lawmakers for the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) had visited him in jail.
    Delmastro was the source of the information.
    The PD has demanded Delmastro and Donzelli, a member of the Copasir parliamentary committee that oversees Italy's intelligence services, quit for, among other things, revealing allegedly secret information.
    Justice Minister Carlo Nordio, however, has said that the information was sensitive but not classified.
    Delmastro fuelled the row on Friday by saying that the PD lawmakers had given in to Cospito's demand that they meet other people being held under the 41 bis, including two mafia bosses, as a condition for the encounter with him.
    "The PD will have to explain that bow to the mafiosi to the public," Delmastro said in an interview with local daily newspaper 'Il Biellese', based in his home town of Biella in Piedmont.
    he PD has said it would take legal action against Delmastro and Donzelli.
    Meloni has dismissed the Delmastro and Donzelli quit calls and defended her MPs while calling for everyone to "tone things down" in the row. (ANSA).