TRANI – No appeal has been received at the registry office either by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Trani or by the General Prosecutor’s Office at the Court of Appeal. And so, since yesterday, the ruling of the Court of Trani regarding the so-called “landfill trial” has become final and the acquittals have become definitive.
This is what all the former defendants in the criminal case not only hoped for, but reasonably expected, for whom the public prosecution had formulated requests for sentences ranging from a minimum of one to a maximum of 3 years. While the Municipality of Trani, a civil party, had in turn requested compensation of one million euros from any convicted persons.
And then all those no longer accused among former mayors, administrators, managers and municipal and regional officials were officially acquitted (Giuseppe Tarantini, Luigi Nicola Riserbato, Pina Chiarello, Giuseppe De Simone, Giuseppe Affatato, Antonello Antonicelli, Giuseppe Tedeschi, Giuseppe Maestri, Caterina Di Bitonto, Pasquale and Pietro Elia Abaticchio, Fancesco Sotero, Francesco Di Toma, Pasquale Sorrenti, Antonello Ruggiero, Antonio Peluso, Domenico Angiolella and Michele Zecchillo, the latter deceased in the meantime) because the facts do not exist or because they have not been committed, over two prescriptions only.
According to the prosecution’s theory (the public prosecutor who instructed the investigation was Michele Ruggiero, who was replaced in the proceedings by his colleague Francesco Tosto), the absence of a biogas collection system would have led to an excess presence of the material in the inside the landfill, with the consequence of an enormous pressure which led to the release of leachate without control from some pipes, but also, and above all, the push towards the edges of the landfill and therefore the concrete possibility that that was precisely the reason of the accident at the basis of the dispersion of leachate in the groundwater which caused the closure of the landfill on 4 September 2014. According to the public prosecution, the risk of an explosion would also have been real.
The Criminal Court of Trani in collegiate composition (president Corvino, alongside Pedone and Ruggeri), in the ruling of last February 1st, excluded the possibility of the crimes being contested, «since the dispersion of biogas has never shown any anomaly, the overcoming of levels of chemical substances in the wells can be traced back to a specific and promptly addressed situation and the danger of explosion has not been proven in any way. In view of this – he concludes -, it seems superfluous to highlight how none of the omissive conduct, deduced in the indictment, can be placed in a casual relationship with the highlighted phenomena”.
