Filippo Piritore, former Palermo Police agent and later former Government delegate, 75 years old, was arrested this Friday on charges of having tampered with evidence from the attack by Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia, in which the then-president of the Sicily region, Piersanti Mattarella, brother of the current president of the Italian Republic, died in 1980.
Following investigations by the Palermo Prosecutor’s Office into the case that led to the arrest, the then officer of the Mobile Brigade “falsified and concealed what he knew” about evidence from the scene of the attack: a glove abandoned by the killer in the car used in the ambush of the president of the Sicilian Region, who was shot dead while in his vehicle, Italian media report.
The then-Minister of the Interior, Virginio Rognoni, pointed to that glove as “the only object that could belong to the criminals” but the evidence disappeared “on purpose, to obstruct the investigation”, according to the prosecutors.
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Piritore, now retired, after his time in the Mobile Brigade, also served as police commissioner in Caltanissetta, L’Aquila and Genoa, and as government delegate of Isernia.
According to the investigations, which were reopened in 2017 to clarify who the unknown authors were, 45 years later, the brown leather glove passed through the hands of the former police officer who was on duty the day of the assassination and was found in the stolen Fiat 127, used and abandoned by Mattarella’s assassins.
In front of the front right seat, the glove was found which, according to documents signed by Piritore, was taken and entrusted to an on-duty agent in the scientific police, Giuseppe Di Natale, to be delivered to the on-duty prosecutor in charge of the investigation, Pietro Grasso. Something that both Di Natale and Grasso denied had happened.
During the interrogations at the Prosecutor’s Office, Di Natale said that he only knew Piritore by name and that he had never received any evidence or instructions from him.
Grasso explained that not only had he never received the glove, but he hadn’t even heard of it from the Police, nor had he ever asked for it to be handed over, “there being no investigative reason for that to happen”.
Piritore, however, confirmed the version that he noted in the documents recovered from the time, adding that Grasso ordered to return the glove to the forensic police for further testing.
Statements that the Prosecution considers “false” and that prove that the investigation was “seriously contaminated and compromised by the actions of members of the institutions, with the clear objective of preventing the identification of the perpetrators of the assassination of the Sicilian former president”, add the media.
The Palermo Prosecutor’s investigation seeks to clarify whether the perpetrators on January 6, 1980, were the known Cosa Nostra hitmen Nino Madonia and Giuseppe Lucchese, already convicted of other murders and in prison, and the possible accomplices who hindered the investigations.
