The trial in the court of assizes in Como for the murder of Mr. Roberto Malgesini, 50, of Cosio Valtellino, stabbed to death on the morning of September 15, 2020 in Como, while in the car he was preparing to bring breakfast to the homeless of the city. No discount to the accused, Ridha Mahmoudi, 57, Tunisian, a man Don Roberto had helped over and over again over the years.
For the death of the priest of the last, the judges sentenced the accused to life imprisonment for premeditated voluntary homicide, not recognizing the mental illness or considering the need to resort to a psychiatric report, as firmly requested by the defense, lawyer Sonia Bova. The lawyer accused the court for a lack of courage in investigating the psychiatric situation of the accused. And for this he announced an appeal.
Murder of Don Roberto Malgesini: request for trial for the murderer of the “priest of the last” of Como
The proof of premeditation
The prosecutor Massimo Astori (the same prosecutor of the trial for the Erba massacre) in the morning removed all doubts from the court, both about premeditation and about the clarity and awareness of the accused, that tragic morning. In his long and precise reconstruction, the prosecutor retraced what happened at 7, in front of the church of San Rocco in Como: in the courtroom he showed the video of the cameras that record the arrival of the accused in front of the priest’s house, and in which in the background you can see the figure of the murderer bending down and violently lowering the knife several times. He reconstructed the path of the murderer immediately after, when he walked to the carabinieri barracks to turn himself in and confess. He retraced the life in Italy of Mahmoudi, a regular immigrant due to his marriage to an Italian who then, after separation, remained in our country for health reasons.
Astori has reconstructed the incredible bureaucratic process linked to six expulsion decrees against the accused, which were never carried out. And he concluded by stating that Mahmoudi acted on that very day, because the hearing in front of the justice of the peace who would have sent him back to Tunisia was scheduled for that very day.
During the indictment Mahmoudi, present in the courtroom, highlighted some passages, laughing blatantly. The magistrate then focused on premeditation, on the purchase of the knife months earlier, on the existence – according to the Tunisian – of a plot that would have liked to have him return to Tunisia. A plot hatched, in the mind of the murderer, by Don Roberto, by the lawyers who had assisted him in past years, by the prefect and the police. All traitors who were punished. For Astori, however, Mahmoudi was indeed a man afflicted by delusions of persecution, but certainly not a madman. Line shared in full by the Court, President Valeria Costi, and by the popular jurors, who also condemned the accused to the compensation of the civil parties, the two brothers of Don Roberto for the symbolic sum of one euro each.
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