'Suspicions generate threats' - ANM over Open Arms case

(ANSA) - ROME, OCT 18 - Mediatic tension and suspicions connected to a trial can produce verbal violence and threats, Giuseppe Santalucia, the head of the National Association of Magistrates (ANM), the judiciary's union, said on Friday after one of the prosecutors in Palermo who requested a six-year jail term for Deputy Premier and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini in the Open Arms case was given a security detail due to the threats she had received.
    "If a climate of mediatic tension is created around a trial, the effects can be these.
    "Trials must take place in a climate that is as serene as possible for everyone's benefit", Santalucia told ANSA.
    "Operations that create an aura of suspicion around a trial can have this type of impact: attacks on people, therefore magistrates, with verbal violence and threats", Santalucia said, urging everyone involved to have "wisdom" because "controversies are only damaging and prejudicial".
    Palermo prosecutor Giorgia Righi, one of the State attorneys on the Open Arms case and a member of the DDA anti-mafia investigative division, was assigned a security detail, judicial sources said Friday.
    She was the only State attorney on the team following the case who had not been given protection yet.
    The Palermo State attorneys last month asked for six years' imprisonment for former interior minister and current Deputy Premier and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini on charges of kidnapping and refusal to perform official acts for having prevented, five years ago, the disembarkation from the Spanish NGO rescue ship Open Arms of 147 migrants in Lampedusa.
    A hearing of the trial is scheduled on Friday. (ANSA).