Perhaps there was indeed intimidation behind the attack on a teacher in the courtyard of a school in Ostia by a woman from the Spada clan. A detail that will have to be clarified by the police investigations into the episode, which occurred on Tuesday morning at the ring of the bell.
Meanwhile, encouragement is coming from many quarters for the teacher to file a complaint against the woman, mother of a student and wife of a member of the Spada family. And controversy is mounting over some words from the mini-mayor of the municipality Mario Falconi (Pd) who, according to a Lega councilor, Monica Picca, “invited silence” during the council meeting. “If you endorse fear, it means you have failed on all fronts,” says the councilor. But when the controversy exploded, with Salvini also bringing Schlein into play – ‘does he think that clans are fought with silence?’ – the mini-mayor says he “has been misunderstood”.
“I absolutely don’t want to downplay it, I have an infinite sense of legality,” says Falconi after a visit to the school where the violence occurred. “There are many initiatives implemented so far and I will not allow anyone, with these vile episodes, to discredit the value of our territory and its inhabitants” he assured.
Mario Rusconi, president of the National Association of Principals (ANP) of Rome, also urged us not to give in to fear and silence: “teachers should not be afraid to report although I can understand considering the particularly dangerous context”.
And the visit to the institute by the Minister of Education Valditara is expected next week, who returned to talk about the episode today. “It’s serious that in a school you have to be afraid – he said – and that there is someone who can afford to attack a teacher by recovering slogans from the past ‘she doesn’t know who I am’ and that ‘who am I’ evokes a group that had among its members someone who had problems with the law” said the minister.
Meanwhile this morning, a first report from the Carabinieri on the ‘punitive expedition’ against the teacher was sent to Piazzale Clodio. In the next few hours the investigators will listen to the witnesses and the teacher in question, slapped in the face by the woman, who railed against her because the day before she had scolded her child while arguing with some classmates. “You must not allow yourself to scold him” the woman would have said. Valditara defined it as a “disturbing” story. “We must give a strong testimony of the presence of the State, of the closeness of the State to all teachers – he continued – and above all to say clearly that no mafia, political or other type of intimidation will be able to prevent Italian teachers and Italian schools from doing the most beautiful profession in the world”. For the Libera association “nothing in Ostia happens by chance”. According to Gianpiero Cioffredi, representative of Lazio, and Gaetano Salvo, representative of Rome “the attack represents the reaffirmation of the exercise of the criminal power of the Spada clan in the territory of Nuova Ostia”.
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