Ailing former Cosa Nostra boss of
bosses Totò Riina is entitled to a dignified death and so a
Bologna detention review court should re-examine a defence plea
for him to be moved to house arrest or have his life sentence
shortened, Italy's supreme Court of Cassation said Monday.
Riina, 86 and suffering from various ailments, has seen
several previous pleas turned down.
Riina, nicknamed the Beast for his ferocity, is serving life
for a slew of crimes including the assassinations of anti-Mafia
magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino 25 years ago.
Another infamous assassination was that of Carabinieri
General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, recently appointed prefect
of Palermo, in 1982.
His daughter Rita Dalla Chiesa, a TV presenter, was among
those who criticised the Cassation Court Monday.
"I think that my father did not have a signified death, they
murdered him leaving him, his wife and (escort) Domenico Russo
in the car without even a sheet to cover them", she said on
Italian TV.
Th association of Italian criminal lawyers came out in favour
of clemency, saying "the goal of detention cannot be revenge"
but the association of victims of the Florentine via dei
Georgofili bombing, which killed five people near the Uffizi
Gallery in 1993, said they were "dumbstruck" by the Cassation's
ruling.
The head of the parliamentary anti-mafia commission, Rosy
Bindi of the ruling centre-left Democratic Party, said there was
no "need" to move Riina because he had all the treatment he
required in a prison hospital.
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