Beniamino Zuncheddu is free and innocent. After 33 years in prison, the judges of the Court of Appeal of Rome, at the end of the review process, acquitted the former breeder of the accusation of being the author of the Sinnai massacre, in the province of Cagliari, on 8 January 1991 in which three shepherds died and a fourth person was seriously injured. The judges revoked the life sentence by dropping the charges for Zuncheddu with the formula “for not having committed the crime”. The sentence, after a deliberation that lasted a few hours, was received with emotion by many present in the courtroom, many arriving from Sardinia who applauded for a few moments after the reading of the device. In the courtroom was Zuncheddu himself, for whom the Capitoline judges had suspended his sentence on November 25th and released him.
“For me it’s the end of a nightmare”, said the former breeder who appeared visibly emotional. The Court of Appeal therefore accepted the requests of the general prosecutor, Francesco Piantoni, who during the indictment reconstructed thirty years of judicial proceedings, placing the credibility of Luigi Pinna, now 62 years old and the only survivor, at the center of his speech of the massacre in which Gesuino Fadda, 56 years old, his son Giuseppe, 24 years old, and Ignazio Pusceddu, 55 years old, who worked for the two, were shot dead inside a sheepfold.
“In this matter there are lies that have lasted 30 years”, said the prosecution representative. The reference is to the superwitness Pinna who in February of that year indicated Zuncheddu, who had been stopped by the police but immediately declared himself innocent, as the Sinnai killer. An accusation that came after Pinna himself had immediately claimed that he could not recognize the perpetrator of the murders because his face was distorted by a sock.
During the review process came the twist. In a dramatic testimony, Pinna stated that in February 33 years ago, before “identifying the suspects, the police officer who was conducting the investigation showed me the photo of Zuncheddu and told me that he was the culprit of the massacre. It went like this: I wrong to listen to the wrong person”. In the indictment, referring to Pinna, the attorney general did not mince words. “Pinna’s reliability was the fulcrum for the life prison sentence for Zuncheddu – he said -, but Beniamino didn’t see it properly and lied for 30 years”.
The prosecutor then made references to the possible motive and alibi of the accused, also returning to the investigative activity carried out after the massacre. At the time, the investigators focused from the first moment on disagreements between the farmers in the area and in particular between the Fadda family and that of the Zuncheddu, a family from Burcei, who managed another sheepfold. The police took this lead in light of some episodes that had occurred before the massacre and in particular the killing of some livestock and dogs as well as the arguments that arose between the farmers.
The massacre took place in a few minutes. The killer arrived at Cuile is Coccus in Sinnai aboard a scooter and first killed Gesuino Fassa, who was on the access road to the sheepfold, and then went up towards the cattle pen to fire in the direction of his son Giuseppe. Pusceddu was instead killed while he was inside a shack together with Pinna. At the time Zuncheddu was 27 years old, he was stopped after a few days and a judicial ordeal began for him whose final word came after 33 years.
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