Rimini, 28 April 2024 – Last Thursday he closed his eyes forever, there in the room of the Geriatrics department of theParma hospital which he occupied permanently for eight yearsthat is, since his mind had regressed to that of a child due to the brain damage suffered after one brutal assault in prisonAnd. He died, at the age of 39 years old, Dritan Demiraj.
The Blue Lake Killer he had been sentenced to life imprisonment for a double homicideor: that of Silvio Mannina, whom he had tortured and killed on the evening of February 28, 2014, after luring him into a trap in Rimini with the complicity of his lover Monica Sanchi; and that of his ex-partner and mother of his children, Lidia Nusdorfi, massacred the following day with 11 stab wounds in the underpass of the Mozzate station, in the Como area.
For some time now, Dritan’s appearance had been very different from that of the young man with a mocking smile immortalized by photographers behind the glass of the armored cell of the Rimini court, at the time of the trial. Demiraj he was now struggling to recognize even his relatives and he no longer remembered anything, neither of Mannina – whom he had tortured to death before disposing of his corpse by throwing it into the swamp of Lago Azzurro of Santarcangelo – nor of Nusdorfi and all the other protagonists of a macabre story that shook one to the core Rimini and the whole of Italy.
In April of 2016 the former Albanian pastry chef was ended up in a coma after being beaten to a pulp with punches and kicks by a former Romanian boxer, in the corridors of the Parma prison where he was serving a life sentence for double aggravated voluntary homicide, concealment of a corpse, private violence, robbery and illegal carrying of a knife. Due to his irreversible clinical conditions, the killer had been declared “incapable of understanding and will”: in 2017 he was formally free again, after the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Bologna, applying the Orlando reform to the letter, ruled that he had no place to proceed. For the family of Demiraj (who was defended by the lawyer Massimiliano Orrù of the Rimini Bar) the path to a possible request for compensation for the beating immediately in prison.
Even Dritan, like Monica Sanchi, had to deal with a cynical destiny, almost a sort of curse, which seems to persecute the actors and supporting actors of this dark story. Demiraj’s ex-lover was sentenced to 30 years of prison: in 2019, a spinal cord tumor took her away after confining her to bed in a state of paralysis.
“I am not a monster, don’t judge me too harshly” he had implored before dying. Swearing that if she went back, she would stop Ditran from slaughtering two people. “My curse was to cross paths with her. To have loved him,” she had said.
Sadik Dine, Ditran’s uncle, he is serving a life sentence in Ferrara prison, which became definitive in the Supreme Court after the Court of Appeal overturned the five-year first degree sentence for concealment of a corpse. The former fisherman has always maintained that he limited himself to help his nephew get rid of Mannina’s body, but according to Sanchi’s testimony she actively participated in the crime. Twenty-eight years is the sentence imposed on the fourth protagonist of the story, a friend of Demiraj, a minor at the time of the events, who has always professed himself innocent.
