Supreme court rejects Stasi appeal (2)

(ANSA) - Rome, June 28 - The supreme Court of Cassation on Wednesday rejected Alberto Stasi's petition to suspend his 16-year prison term for murdering his girlfriend Chiara Poggi in the northern town of Garlasco in August 2007 and to reopen the case.
    Stasi's lawyers had made an extraordinary appeal to review the sentence, which in theory was already definitive, with a new appeals trial with witnesses that had given evidence at the first-instance trial. Earlier this year a probe into a suspected alternative killer of Poggi, 26, was shelved.
    That probe looked at the possibility that Poggi's killer may have been a friend of her brother's.
    Stasi's defence team presented DNA evidence allegedly linking the friend to the murder.
    But a preliminary investigations judge dismissed the team's work as "insubstantial".