Drug trafficking, room racketeering at the former Astor hotel, mistaken identity, possible sexual abuse: these are the main investigative leads that the Florence prosecutor’s office is favoring in the investigation it has been conducting for a year now into the little girl’s case. 5-year-old of Peruvian origin Mia Kataleya Chicclo Alvarez, known to all simply as Kata, who disappeared on 10 June 2023 from the former Astor hotel in via Maragliano in Florence, a structure at the time illegally occupied by many people, including Kata and her family. This is what chief prosecutor Filippo Spiezia explained this morning, three days before the anniversary of Kata’s disappearance.
Prosecutor Spieza underlined how the investigation is “highly complex” also because “it is aggravated by the fact that the news of the disappearance arrived with a time gap compared to the disappearance, but also because we believe based on the elements collected that it is the result of ‘implementation of a plan that has been well organized in detail, and not an extemporaneous activity.” The investigators’ work, he continued, “is continuing on multiple tracks, and the difference compared to the initial phase is that our work is more selective with respect to the hypotheses taken into consideration”. Spiezia then assured that «the investigations have never been interrupted», and «not only have we continued to cultivate possible new leads, but also proceeded with an ongoing re-reading of the investigative and informative material documents collected in the first phase of the investigation, because evidently with a greater familiarity of names, faces, sounds and voices of people it is now possible to enhance detailed aspects compared to an initial phase of investigation”.
The chief prosecutor of Florence also explained that «advanced investigative techniques have been launched to find traces and evidence necessary for completing the work» and that there is «confirmation that the network of video cameras surrounding the Astor hotel had a hole from the observation of the video cameras and we have reason to believe that that hole was exploited by whoever kidnapped the little girl.” There are currently two suspects “but there are no elements to decline the position of these two subjects”. The two communities involved because they were present in the former Astor hotel, the Peruvian and the Romanian, «were characterized by non-collaborative attitudes, and we moved within a framework of silence» and «the investigations also developed on an international level having contacts with both Romanian and Peruvian authorities”.
