The WFP, the United Nations agency, does not want to give justice to the Italian ambassador Luca Attanasio and the carabiniere of his escort Vittorio Iacovacci, killed in Congo on 22 February 2021 in an ambush. The trial of the Court of Rome, which must ascertain responsibility for what happened, could run aground even before starting due to the diplomatic immunity demanded by the United Nations for its leaders under investigation. A question that the UN legal office has officially posed but which the Rome Prosecutor’s Office does not consider founded. The danger is to witness a tug-of-war with institutions and foreign countries such as those already underway over delicate cases: the murder of Giulio Regeni in Egypt and the death of Mario Paciolla, the Neapolitan aid worker who worked for the UN, found hanged in Colombia.
The investigations of the Roman magistrates into the assassination of Attanasio and Iacovacci are in fact now over: in the coming weeks, after a final confrontation with the Carabinieri del Ros, the deputy prosecutor of Rome, Sergio Colaiocco, will proceed with the notice of conclusion. The prosecutor believes it has identified serious responsibilities of the World Food Program (WFP), the United Nations agency that organized the trip to a village in the north-east of Congo. Some basic safety rules would not have been respected (it was known that the area was subject to attacks by marauders, therefore an armed escort was needed) and, even, some documents of the trip are altered. For this reason, Mansour Rwagaza, responsible for the safety of the convoy, was entered in the register of suspects, accused of manslaughter for omitted caution. A whole series of shortcomings attributable to the WFP manager were lined up: he would not have asked five days in advance, as required by law, for authorization to move in order to have an armed escort; he had the ambassador and the others move in unarmored cars, with bulletproof vests in the trunk; an even more serious circumstance, he allegedly falsified the names of the participants in the mission, omitting those of Attanasio and Iacovacci. If they had been specified, in fact, an armed escort should have been automatically set up. In retrospect, he would have saved the lives of the two Italians and their driver, Mustafa Milambo.
The convoy was the object of an ambush on a road, the N2 which starts from Goma and cuts through the Congolese province of Kivu from South to North, already the scene of several firefights: between 2018 and 2021 our investigators counted them at least 20, including criminal militias and park guards. Before the prosecutor Colaiocco, Rwagaza was unable to offer adequate explanations. Reason why, during the interrogation, he entered him in the register of suspects. It was at that moment that the friction with the UN agency began: the legal department of the WFP immediately pointed out that on the basis of two different rules (the 1947 Convention on United Nations Agencies and the agreement of the 1994 with which the WFP, choosing Italy as its headquarters, extended guarantees to its officials), all executives would enjoy immunity. A theory, however, disputed by the Rome prosecutor’s office, which opposes a legal interpretation also shared by the Farnesina: it is true that the convention extends immunity to WFP officials, but it is equally true that it only provides for those accredited in Italy. Mansour was in Congo, not in our country.
The question is technical, but obviously also of substance: Italy cannot and absolutely does not want to allow the death of two servants of the state to be orphaned of responsibility. The Foreign Ministry does not want it and the Rome Prosecutor’s Office does not want it. Also for this reason, the investigations, before reaching their conclusion, will further deepen the positions of other people, including those of the Italian Rocco Leone, number two of the WFP mission in Congo and who miraculously escaped the ambush.
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