Protests mounted on Tuesday over a centre-left MP with a terrorist past who has been appointed assistant to the House speaker. Sergio D'Elia, a former top member of 1970s hard-left terrorist organisation Prima Linea (Front Line) who was in prison for 12 years, was elected one of six assistants to
House Speaker Fausto Bertinotti on May 30.
Opposition MPs, police associations and the family of a prison guard killed during a 1978 Prima Linea assault on a Florence jail were outraged by the appointment. Former communications minister Maurizio Gasparri, a member of the rightist National Alliance (AN), called on D'Elia to step down on Tuesday.
Gasparri said it "wasn't right" that taxpayers should foot the bill for the benefits the former terrorist was now entitled to.
He noted that the speakership assistant post meant D'Elia would be given an office, a chauffeur-driven car and at least 2,000 euros extra per month on top of an MP's already generous salary. The UDC, a centrist, Catholic party in opposition chief Silvio Berlusconi's four-way coalition, also stepped up its attack on the MP.
The party sent parliamentarians excerpts from the definitive sentence condemning D'Elia to 25 years in prison for his role in the 1978 prison assault. An MP with Berlusconi's Forza Italia party said the decision to promote D'Elia to speakership secretary was "unwise and lacking in a sense of institutional responsibility".
Independent police union SAP swelled the protests, demanding that D'Elia resign as MP and threatening to take to the streets if he refused to do so. "We are indignant... It's unacceptable that one of the local leaders of Prima Linea, which was responsible for the death of young prison guard Fausto Dionisi, should today be holding a high-profile political post".
Last week, Dionisi's widow Marcella thanked the UDC for "defending the memory" of her husband and others like him who had "died defending democracy against the threat of terrorism". Marcella Dionisi, who was left with a two-year-old
daughter when her husband was killed, said she felt "annihilated and humiliated" by D'Elia's election.
"The truth is that terrorists obtain everything and their dead victims nothing," she said. The Italian Association of the Victims of Terrorism also blasted D'Elia's election as an "offence to the victims of terrorism".
During the late 1970s, D'Elia was the leader of the Tuscany division of Prima Linea. In January 1978, Prima Linea attacked a prison in Florence where several fellow terrorists were being held, killing Dionisi. In the early 1980s, D'Elia was sentenced to 25 years for his involvement even though he took no direct part in the attack.
Released after 12 years, D'Elia went on to become the head of Nessuno Tocchi Caino (Hands Off Cain), an Italian anti-death penalty movement, and was elected an MP in April with the Rose in the Fist (RNP), a liberal formation in the centre-left coalition of Premier Romano Prodi.
The RNP confirmed on Tuesday its confidence in D'Elia, saying that "he has every political, civil and moral right to be an MP".
In a public letter sent to House Speaker Bertinotti on Saturday, D'Elia said he refused to be a "perpetual hostage to my past and what I did 30 years ago". He also argued that his actions in the 1970s were more akin to those of a "19th century anarchist" than a "murderous suicide terrorist of this millennium".
Bertinotti also defended the MP, saying his role as speaker's assistant did not represent an "institutional problem".
Other members of the centre-left governing coalition said that D'Elia had paid for his crimes by serving time and now enjoyed the rights accorded to any Italian citizen. Olga D'Antona, an MP with the Democratic Left whose own husband was murdered by leftist terrorists in May 1999, said that "D'Elia has paid his debt. We should welcome the fact that people can change in prison. To think otherwise would be devastating".
