Italian police on Friday made an
arrest in the death of Fortuna Loffredo, a six-year-old girl who
fell to her death from a balcony in Caivano near Naples in June
2014.
An autopsy on the girl's body found she had been the victim
of sexual abuse.
The partner of a neighbour of Fortuna's mother was
arrested, police said.
The neighbour's son, Antonio, had also fallen to his death
a year previously.
The suspect, Raimondo Caputo, 44, is accused of sexual
violence and murder.
Caputo has been in prison since November 2015, suspected of
sexual abuse of the three-year-old daughter he had with his
girlfriend, who is on house arrest for the same accusation.
Prosecutors said they suspected since the beginning that
Fortuna had been the victim of a paedophilia ring.
Fortuna's mother, Domenica Guardato, said that she knew the
couple was responsible for her daughter's death.
"I've always been sure that it was them, I always said it,"
Guardato said.
"I've never met him, but I asked her and she always denied
it," she said.
"She is sick, and there's also another person who knew
everything, that woman's mother".
Guardato said that everyone in the neighbourhood kept quiet
about Fortuna's death, invoking an unspoken code of silence
about the crime.
"I was thinking, hoping, that today, at least today,
someone from this cursed place would come up to me to say
something, a hug, but instead, nothing. Here, there's always
been and there always will be silence".
She said she is the "only condemned" person to emerge from
the tragedy.
"Because here I am with an immense pain, that will never go
away. Because I loved Fortuna, as only a mother can, and they
killed her. And still today I don't know why," Guardato said.
Naples prosecutor Domenico Airoma said that it was children
who gave the investigation a breakthrough.
"The adults were hindering the investigations. The children
permitted the turnaround," Airoma said, referring specifically
to three children of the arrested man's girlfriend.
Airoma said that the adults in the neighbourhood had "a
conspiracy of silence, indifference, and culpable collusion".
The Naples prosecutor's office investigated the case for
two years up against this climate of silence.
On Friday investigators said that Caputo had been sexually
abusing Fortuna for some time, and that he allegedly pushed her
from the eighth-floor balcony when she put up resistance to his
abuse.
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