The writers of a controversial docu-film which accuses former premier Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party of election fraud is being probed on suspicion of spreading false information.
The film, Uccidete la Democrazia! (Killing Democracy!), focuses on the general election held in Italy last spring, when centre-left leader Romano Prodi just squeaked past Berlusconi's centre-right alliance.
The film's underlying theory is that blank voting slips were converted into votes for Forza Italia using software installed in the system for transmitting data to the Interior Ministry's central tallying system.
The substance of the film has been firmly denied by the centre right but all 100,000 copies were immediately snapped up when it was released last week with left-wing political weekly Diario.
Rome prosecutors looking into the claims made in the film informed one of its authors, Diario editor Enrico Deaglio, he was under investigation as they were questioning him on Tuesday.
"I thought that they were going to reconstruct what happened during the general elections, not that this would happen," Deaglio told the press later.
"I have been included in the list of suspects because I shed doubt on the legitimacy of the election result. I wouldn't call this intimidation but a barrier placed in the way of investigative journalism".
Co-author Beppe Cremagnani, a journalist, is also under investigation.
If prosecutors decide after their probe that they have enough evidence, they could eventually ask for the two to face trial for publishing 'false, exaggerated or tendentious information likely to disturb public order'.
The offence is punishable with a three-month suspended prison sentence and a fine of up to 300 euros.
It is far from certain that the case will go to court but Berlusconi's supporters treated the news of the probe's fresh direction as vindication of their claims of innocence.
Berlusconi's spokesperson Paolo Bonaiuti commented: "It could only ever end this way. It was clear."
APOLOGY DEMANDED.
"In a serious country Mr Deaglio would apologise to Berlusconi and to the former interior minister," Forza Italia party coordinator Enrico Bondi said, .
Deaglio's film recreates the night of April 10 when Italy began counting the votes at the end of its two-day election, which Prodi eventually won by the thinnest margin - 25,000 votes - in Italian postwar history.
Using actors to play Berlusconi and then-interior minister Beppe Pisanu, Killing Democracy! claims electoral fraud was carried out by Berlusconi's party using blank ballot slips to bump up its total.
It speculates that the fraud was stopped at the last minute by Pisanu, leaving Prodi with a razor-thin advantage over Berlusconi.
To support his theory, Deaglio focuses on the sharp drop in the number of blank slips in the last election - 1.1% of the total compared to 4.2% in the previous 2001 election.
The film also raises doubts about electronic vote counting, introduced for the first time in the 2006 election in four of Italy's 20 regions, and claims to show how fraud could be perpetrated using such systems.
The film concludes that electronic voting is a major threat to democracy in many Western countries.
The head of the opposition rightist National Alliance Gianfranco Fini last week called for a complete recount of all the ballot slips from the spring elections.
But House Speaker Fausto Bertinotti, a hard leftist, said that "the legitimacy of the results is fully guaranteed... I would exclude that the evidence presented could have any influence on the election result".
