Magistrate Raffaele Cantone, today March 7, during a hearing before the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission, explains Perugia's investigation into the case. The head of the Umbrian Public Prosecutor's Office began with a premise: “I believe that we must reestablish the truth about what has been said at this point. Also to protect an institution, like that of the Anti-Mafia Prosecutor's Office, which for me is sacred.” The accused and suspects have full right to the presumption of innocence – Cantone continued -, this is why at the Anti-Mafia “we will speak of undisputed historical facts. The prosecutor's task is not to solve problems, but to deal with crimes.”
Cantone explained that “the SOS market did not stop at all”: “During the first information leak, at one point there was reference in a newspaper to an SOS who had not seen Striano but one of his colleagues, and who is on a relationship between an entrepreneur and the Minister of Defense. “The figures that I am going to explain are much more important than those which have been circulating so far, they are monstrous and worrying figures.”
The history of the investigation
The investigation arose from a report in Rome by Guido Crosetto. “On October 31, 2022, the Minister of Defense filed a complaint with the carabinieri concerning the leak of information on his assets. The records are acquired to verify who might have had access to very delicate documents that were not at all accessible with other tools as some claim. The verification immediately shows that it was Lieutenant Pasquale Striano who had access to these documents, who received the notice of investigation in January and was questioned by the Rome Public Prosecutor's Office on March 1, 2023. The access carried out by Striano did not present any element of abnormality. We have many 615ter proceedings that access documents with improper access, perhaps to favor a friend. Following interrogation, Striano stated that this was an ordinary modus operandi, so Laudati was informed about it and on March 10, so a few days later, Striano was searched and the relevant documents were acquired . In the subsequent evaluation that Perugia will carry out after the file transfer, clear elements of data erasure appear. There are conversations with journalists who have great confidence with him which do not contain any element and which will be difficult to recover. » November 24
All Striano files
Cantone explains that from January 1, 2019 to November 24, 2022, Striano would have had access to “more than 10 thousand SOS”, a figure which results from the cross-referencing of various data, even if the number currently verified is “4,124 SOS”: The files implicated, specifies Cantone, concern “1531 natural persons and 74 legal persons for the SOS, 1123 people for the Serpico base, 1947 for the Sdi base”. And again, “he downloaded 33,528 files from the database of the National Anti-Mafia Directorate”. This enormous amount of data, adds the prosecutor, suggests that there is an instigator: “What happened to this enormous amount of data?” Striano, as Open also reported, “also asked the SOS about himself or his wife, perhaps to understand if he had been investigated.” These are “165 VIP accesses which are the subject of the indictment”. The financial police checked all the newspaper articles he talked about in certain chats, to see if there were specific questions, explains Cantone: “We only investigated the journalists, with provisional charges, when he There was no news of an investigation that had been given to the press but it was the press that had requested information about someone and it was on this basis that the question was asked to SOS. For the simple leaks of confidential documents, we proceeded separately from one-off accesses.” The number of accesses carried out is excessively high, explains Cantone, but it is not certain that elements were found: “There were also accesses which have contributed nothing. No one at the Perugia public prosecutor's office held a press conference after the new rule came into force. It is not up to me to know what a file is and what is information, but Striano made a frantic search for information which was often limited to this question. If we believe that this research has resulted in archiving and classification, we have no information to say so.”
Update
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