Responding to a request from the parliamentary commission on the massacre, the prime minister clarified: “In the cabinets of the ministries and state apparatuses there is nothing inaccessible, nothing that is not known exists and that cannot be read and studied. “
ROME. There are no classified documents on the Moby Prince disaster: all the state documents are public, available for consultation. Italy has not written ‘top secret’ on the papers that tell what happened on the evening of 10 April 1991, when the Navarma ferry collided with Agip Abruzzo, off the coast of Livorno. There were 140 deaths: only one survivor of the ferry, while on the tanker they were all saved. Responding to a request from the parliamentary commission on the massacre, the prime minister Mario Draghi clarified: in the cabinets of the ministries and state apparatuses there is nothing inaccessible, nothing that is not known exists and that cannot be read and studied.
“There are no deeds or documents” that are “subject to secrecy classifications”, wrote Draghi to the president of the commission, the deputy Pd Andrea Romano, as “it does not appear that limits have been placed on access to the documentation held by the General Command o the Harbor Master’s Office following the requests made by the Judicial Authority and the parliamentary committees “. In the letter, Draghi defines that of the Moby Prince “an open wound for Italy”, stressing that he fully shares “the need to commit himself to the construction of the truth about the facts and shed light on the responsibilities and circumstances that caused the terrible tragedy “.
Which is the task of the parliamentary commission led by Romano. This is the second with the same objective: the works of the first ended in January 2018: “In the collective memory – it was written in the final report – the story of the Moby Prince ferry disaster evokes the fog and the death in a few minutes of 140 passengers and crew members, killed by fire and smoke, betrayed by the distraction “of the crew” perhaps even for a football match. This representation is the result of the results of twenty years of administrative and judicial proceedings ».
Instead, the commission wrote a completely different story: they excluded that there was fog that evening – considered one of the causes of the collision – and excluded negligence on the part of the crew. Not only. The ferry – bound for Olbia – would have turned suddenly, without an explanation. Finally, the topic of rescue: survival times on board would have been quite long, “but – argued the president of the commission, Silvio Lai (Pd) – rescue operations were in fact absent against the Moby Prince”. The new commission therefore has the objective of filling – also – these holes. “Every public act relating to the Moby Prince is available to the judiciary and the Parliament – said Romano – It is one more reason why the commitment of the institutions to the truth proceeds with absolute urgency”. (Giampaolo Grassi / ANSA)