I have nothing to do with the mafia - Cospito

(see related) (ANSA) - ROME, FEB 3 - 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, has stressed to the people he has talked to in Milan's Opera prison that he has nothing to do with the mafia, sources said on Friday.
    The 41 bis is usually reserved for mafia bosses.
    Cospito has said via his lawyer that he is staging the protest against the jail regime itself and not just to get himself out of it.
    "I have nothing to do with the mafia," Cospito said, according to the sources.
    "I want the 41 bis cancelled for everyone because it is an instrument that takes away fundamental freedoms.
    "I have seen elderly and ill mafiosi (in 41 bis), people who are no longer dangerous".
    Giovanni Donzelli, an MP for Premier Giorgia Meloni's right-wing Brothers of Italy (FdI), said in the Lower House this week that the mafia were using Cospito to get the 41 bis scrapped, revealing the anarchist had contact in jail with Neapolitan Camorra mafia boss Francesco Di Maio, according to wiretaps.
    Donzelli said that, according to wiretaps, Di Maio said "bit by bit you get the result" on the same day last month that Cospito met a group of lawmakers from the centre-left Democratic Party (PD).
    The PD has called for Donzelli to quit for releasing an allegedly confidential wiretap but he has refused, and found backing from Justice Minister Carlo Nordio, who said the document the FdI MP read out in parliament was not sensitive.
    Italian left-leaning media have disputed Nordio's statement saying the wiretap was in fact a secret one that should have been kept under wraps. (ANSA).