Attorney Luigi Li Gotti said on
Wednesday that a criminal complaint he filed against Premier
Giorgia Meloni and other officials over the release and flight
back to Libya of an alleged war criminal was a judicial choice
and not a politically-motivated move.
"I made a judicial choice", he told Radio 24.
"As a common citizen, I can't demand resignations.
"I saw aspects of potential culpability and I filed a complaint
as a duty", he noted.
Li Gotti on 23 January sent the complaint to the Rome
Prosecutor's Office on the case of the liberation of Libyan
general Osama Almasri.
Premier Giorgia Meloni on Tuesday she had received notice of a
probe into possible aiding and abetting and embezzlement of
public funds from Rome chief prosecutor Francesco Lo Voi and
that the same notice of investigation had been sent to Justice
Minister Carlo Nordio, Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi and
cabinet secretary with the intelligence brief Alfredo Mantovano.
The Tribunal of Ministers is set to examine the case to decide
whether to pursue it or shelve it.
On Wednesday, Li Gotti was asked in the Radio 24 interview
whether ex-premier and former European Commission President
Romano Prodi, the father of the now deceased progressive Ulivo
alliance under whose government he had served as justice
undersecretary, was behind the initiative.
Li Gotti denied this, saying he has "never spoken in my life
with Prodi".
The attorney has told reporters that he was a member of the
now-defunct Neofascist MSI party and now considers himself close
to the Democratic Party (PD).
He also commented on accusations that he defended members of the
Mafia as an attorney, telling radio 24 that he had done "several
things" in his career, "including defending witnesses for the
State".
He said slain anti-mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone had asked
him to defend Francesco Marino Mannoia, a former member of Cosa
Nostra who turned State's evidence in 1989, "because he had
remained with a defence (attorney) and I had the deontological
duty to accept".
He added that he had also represented the families of
Carabinieri officers killed in Via Fani during the 1978 Red
Brigades' (BR) kidnapping of Christian Democrat statesman Aldo
Moro, of the victims of the Piazza Fontana terror attack in 1969
and of late Milan police commissioner Luigi Calabresi who was
murdered in 1972.
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