North Italy. Mafia type attack against journalist, investigation says

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Following the Anti-Mafia Investigation Division’s probe of the 5 gunshots fired in 2018 an  entrepreneur and former senator and an individual linked to the ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate are identified.

OSSIGENO 6^th September 2023 – The five gunshots that struck the home of journalist Ario Gervasutti in the night between 16^th and 17^th July 2018 in Padua are no longer a mystery. The gunman appears to have been Santino Mercurio, a man close to the Calabrian  ‘Ndrangheta operating in the Veneto region, on the orders of  the entrepreneur Alberto Filippi, who had been a parliamentarian  and senator of the Lega political party.

The shocking explanation was provided after five years by the District Anti-Mafia Directorate of the Court of Venice at the end of the preliminary investigations into 43 suspects for various crimes including the 2018 shooting against the house of journalist Ario Gervasutti, former chief editor of Il Giornale di Vicenza.

The anti-mafia prosecutors Lucia D’Alessandro and Stefano Buccini wrote: “In connivance with each other and with several executive actions of the same criminal plot, Alberto Filippi instructed  Santino Mercurio, giving him a financial remuneration, to carry out an act of intimidation against the former chief editor  of Il Giornale di Vicenza., Ario Gervasutti”.

I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT – Ario Gervasutti told Ossigeno that this was his first reaction to this outcome of the investigation: “I believe that those shots during the night of 2018 constitute the first mafia attack carried out in Veneto. My first reaction was disbelief. It is dismaying to think that the instigator of such a serious act could be an individual who had been part of public institutions and a successful industrialist. I had had only a few contacts with him by phone. He complained that we published disagreeable articles about his company and asked me not to publish some news but his requests were not accepted by me or by the publisher”.

OSSIGENO‘S COMMENT – The director of Ossigeno per l’Informazione commented that the investigations into the intimidating attack on the journalist Ario Gervasutti, have brought out into the  light for the first time the fact that in the Vicenza area there is a worrying porosity between politics -business-criminality and that the background of intimidation and the most serious coercion  suffered in the Veneto region by newspapers and journalists is not dissimilar to that of the southern Italian regions where the mafias have a historical base. But knowing that is not reassuring.

IN VENETO Ossigeno has recorded that one journalist was threatened between January and June 2023 and 111 in total since 2012. The Ossigeno counter shows  6774 journalists in Italy threatened from 2006 to today. Their names are on the List of Threatened Journalists which can be consulted  online. GB

In 2018 Ossigeno immediately dealt with this incident, read also:

Padua: during the night gunshots against the house of a reporter

Interpreting the mystery of the 5 shots in the night