In the trial underway in Kinshasa against the six accused for the death of Ambassador Luca Attanasio, the Italian State - a civil party and long engaged internationally against capital punishment - has asked for the defendants to be sentenced to imprisonment as an alternative to the death penalty. The request was notified during today's hearing dedicated to the defense argument. This was learned from the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo where last Tuesday the prosecution of the Military Court had asked for the death penalty for the five Congolese at the bar and a sixth fugitive.
Athanasius' father: we are against the death penalty
"Adding death to death is useless. If not to bring more pain. We are against it, Luca would have been against it": this is what the father of the Italian ambassador killed in Congo in 2021 Luca Attanasio says in an interview with Corriere della Sera, commenting on the request, by the Kinshasa Public Prosecutor's Office, for the death sentence of the 6 men accused of the murder. "We are against the death penalty. Our Constitution, our civic sense, our Catholic formation say so. They are the same principles in which our son identified. Capital punishment can never alleviate the pain of our family", says Salvatore Attanasio, father of the diplomat killed together with the driver Mustapha Milambo and the carabiniere Vittorio Iacovacci in circumstances not yet fully clarified. "The prosecutor in Congo - he recalled - claimed that it was not an ambush or a degenerate kidnapping attempt, as initially reconstructed, but a real execution". In the case, he notes, there would also be a principal. "On May 25, in Rome, a preliminary hearing is scheduled against two employees of WFP (the UN Food and World Programme that had organized the expedition during which Luca Athanasio was killed, ed): I trust - concludes the father - that many clarifying aspects can emerge".