Today Daily fact headlines on Chico Forti’s return to Italy. And it does so by criticizing the welcome given by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni for the convict, detained all these years in the USA, reached yesterday at the military airport of Pratica di Mare. “The first request of the American Department of Justice and the White House is to avoid making a spectacle of the arrival of what they consider overseas to be a convicted murderer, and was immediately disregarded”, explains Marco Travaglio’s newspaper. «Meloni’s temptation to claim Italy’s international credibility after years of requests from previous governments is too strong», underlines the newspaper, specifying that the negotiations would have been followed personally by the prime minister herself. For the FQ, the situation was broken by the withdrawal of the candidacy of Florida governor Ron DeSantis from the Republican primaries, often accused of laxity by his voters. And then the route, entirely federal, simpler and with a direct line to US President Joe Biden.
Il Fatto Quotidiano also dedicates two editorials to the topic. One signed by Antonio Padellaro, director of Fattoquotidiano.it, the other signed by Selvaggia Lucarelli. The first compares Chico Forti with the case of Ilaria Salis. «In my wrong world, Ilaria Salis’ father should not have attacked the Italian government head-on after the Hungarian justice system granted house arrest to his daughter. (…) It is legitimate and understandable that Giorgia Meloni declared herself “proud of the government” for having obtained the transfer of an Italian citizen to Italy from the American authorities. But when it is the Prime Minister himself who welcomes someone sentenced to life imprisonment by American justice, in a country where, until proven otherwise, the rule of law applies, at least a couple of questions arise spontaneously. Did Giorgia Meloni (and the jubilant Keeper of the Seals Nordio) rush to Pratica di Mare because she was convinced that Chico Forti was the victim of a sensational miscarriage of justice? And therefore, thanks to the Italian government, he was freed from atrocious and unjust detention? In this case, let us know on what basis you, Giorgia Meloni, have such a belief. Because if no one in the Italian government, at the moment, can swear to Chico Forti’s innocence, he still remains guilty of a serious murder, so much so that he will be transferred to the Verona prison to continue serving his sentence”, writes Padellaro. Lucarelli’s editorial instead is titled: “The murderer like a pope, after the usual innocentist nonsense.” «In the metaverse it happens that our Prime Minister, the one who doesn’t lift a finger to stop the carnage in Gaza, goes to welcome Chico Forti at the airport, after having organized his return to Italy on an air force jet. And she welcomes him with all the honors: smiles, official tweets and the inevitable photo”, she writes. And she remembers the murder involving him. «In 1998 you shot a man, Dale Pike, in the head with a .22 caliber gun over a last-minute real estate deal. He left the victim naked, in a grove, to simulate a sexual murder. He tried to get rid of it by lying to the police and also to her wife by saying that she had never met that man and then – faced with overwhelming evidence – retracted. He had a motive, he had no alibi, he owned a .22 caliber pistol and both the phone records and the sand found in his car (which he carefully washed after the murder) placed him at the crime scene. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, he has always said he was the victim of a police plot, but he has always denied authorization to publish the minutes of the trial.”
