The manhunt intensified Friday for
former Senator Marcello Dell'Utri, once a close aide to
centre-right leader Silvio Berlusconi, who has apparently
skipped the country to avoid an arrest warrant on Mafia charges.
Italy's anti-Mafia investigative directorate, DIA, said the
72-year-old Dell'Utri, who was facing the possibility of a jail
sentence on Tuesday if definitively convicted of helping the
Sicilian Mafia, had been missing since mid-March.
Italian authorities have started the procedures to ask
Interpol to help them to track down the wanted man.
Investigators said they had been monitoring Dell'Utri for
weeks and had tried without success to arrest him, after judges
deemed Dell'Utri to be a flight risk on April 8.
Rumours suggested he had fled to Lebanon, possibly using a
passport issued in the tiny nation of San Marino, where the
co-founder of Berlusconi's Forza Italia political party has
extensive business interests.
And prosecutors in Palermo noted that he had been in Beirut
earlier this month.
But in a statement to ANSA Friday, Dell'Utri said that he
was having medical tests after heart surgery, did not intend to
evade authorities, and would appear next week for the supreme
court final decision on his seven-year conviction for Mafia
links.
Dell'Utri had appealed to the supreme Court of Cassation
the seven-year sentence imposed in March, with the final
decision set for Tuesday.
"I would like to clarify that I do not intend to evade the
judicial result of the upcoming sentence of the Court of
Cassation; and, finding myself in precarious health - for which
I had to have an angioplasty a few weeks ago - I am undergoing
further tests and check-ups," Dell'Utri said in a statement.
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