Manipulated wiretaps, forgotten wiretaps, a 12-year judicial investigation that ended up on a dead end, classified documents. It is a story studded with mysteries, omissions, distractions, absence of in-depth and true investigations by the judiciary which also claims the last word for itself. The result is a deep mystery about the perpetrators of what has gone down in history as the massacre of Alcamo Marina which took place in the night between 26 and 27 January 1976 in a barracks of the Arma: on the morning of 27 January 47 years ago they were found the lifeless bodies of two carabinieri, Salvatore Falcetta and Carmine Apuzzo. The cause of the double homicide emerged as a trafficking of fissile material to Libya, which had been going on since at least 1976 and continued at least until 1993: the two soldiers would have been eliminated because they had accidentally stumbled upon a load.
The first arrests
For that massacre, in a hasty and suspicious manner, the carabinieri led by Colonel Giuseppe Russo (killed in a mafia ambush in 1977) arrested five people on the basis of the confession of one of them: 32 years later, in 2008, the investigations for the double Alkamar murder are reopened. One of the soldiers who had participated in the first investigations, Renato Olino, told the Trapani magistrates of a series of illegalities in the investigations into the crime of the so-called barracks: from torture to the ways in which the official truth was advertised in the media.
After Olino’s statements, Giuseppe Gulotta, one of the convicted of the Alcamo massacre, is acquitted in the review process. And to follow the others too thanks to the reviews. One of the five, however, had died in prison under mysterious circumstances after having retracted the version given first to the carabinieri and then to the trial. That year the Trapani prosecutor reopens the investigation into Alkamar but in 2020 a request for filing is made and the perpetrators of the massacre remain unknown. And it is essentially from this point that the Anti-Mafia commission led by Nicola Morra restarted at the end of the legislature, even if we seriously risk never knowing what conclusions it reached, if not in a general way for the content of a report published a few days ago in the documents section of the parliament: «In the light of the considerations made and the first results of the investigation, the commission has arranged to subject the documents drawn up and acquired within the working group to secrecy» reads the report. 47 years later, at first reading, the reason for the secrecy is not clear. “I have declassified everything that was possible to declassify – explains Nicola Morra, president of the Anti-Mafia commission of the XVIII legislature – then there are legal obligations and among the legal obligations there is that of not hindering the investigations of the judiciary”. It appears that there is the possibility of a reopening of the investigation. Moreover, the Anti-Mafia commission has ordered “the overall transmission of the documents produced and acquired to the national Anti-Mafia and anti-terrorism prosecutor, on the basis of a request already received from that judicial authority”.
Why continue to investigate
There are many reasons to continue investigating. The journalist Nicola Biondo listed some of them (who was part of the working group on Alkamar and verified the information in the field) in an article published in the Riformista a couple of weeks ago: among them the name of a judge who allegedly closed a torture investigation at the request of high-ranking carabinieri officers. And then there are the connections with the murders of Peppino Impastato, killed in Cinisi on 9 May 1978, in whose house documents were informally seized at the time, including a file entitled “massacre of Alcamo Marina”, and Mauro Rostagno, killed in Lenzi di Valderice (Trapani) on 26 September 1988. And then there is what the Sicilian journalist defines as “unique”: “the territorial commands of the carabinieri in Sicily involved in the investigations and red herrings did not respond to the Anti-Mafia commission. The general command of the Arma asks several times to let the consultants enter the archives and make the documentation available but the answer is silence. Some wardrobes must remain closed». And it didn’t end there. Because in the meantime the investigation into Alkamar crosses paths with the mafia massacres of 1992-1993. In September of that year, still in Alcamo, an arsenal of weapons was discovered (some of them old but very well kept and ammunition also for war) kept in a villa in the availability of two carabinieri. The policeman who carried out the search with other colleagues, Antonio Federico, reported in 1997 that he had learned from one of his sources the presence in that place of weapons and radioactive material and photos of a blonde woman “aware of all this trafficking”. On the day of the search, there was no trace of radioactive material, although the two informal accesses made previously had been noted. And there was no metal case, which was there before, and which contained the most important material: plastic explosive, probably C4. But there was a photograph of a woman deemed compatible with the description that emerged in the investigations into the attacks of the 1992-1993 period, in which Rosa Belotti was recognized. And here another line of mysteries opens up which the Florence prosecutor’s office is investigating.