The Flying Squad investigators – Property Crimes Section and the PA of the State Police, coordinated by the Catania Prosecutor’s Office, have closed the circle on the fire that occurred on 2 April on the Ognina seafront in Catania where the Cioccolato Cafè bar was set on fire .
The order for the application of precautionary measures was carried out against a 42-year-old AL apparently owner of the business, of a 40-year-old AR accused of being the accomplice, where the Judge for Preliminary Investigations, at the request of the Public Prosecutor holder of the relevant investigation file, has ordered the measure of precautionary custody in prison, for a 39-year-old, the coercive measure of the obligation to stay in the municipality of residence because, an auxiliary employed by a company in charge of cleaning services of the according to the accusation, the hospital where the 42-year-old was hospitalized warned him, on the morning of April 5, of the presence of bugs inside the hospital ward.
The charges, for various reasons and with different profiles of responsibility, of the crimes of arson, manufacturing, possession and carrying in a public place or place open to the public of aggravated deadly devices and personal aiding and abetting.
The investigations of the Flying Squad – Property Crimes Section and the PA of the State Police have made it possible to acquire, in the state of the documents and in relation to a procedural phase which has not yet allowed the intervention of the defence, elements which would demonstrate the involvement of the 42-year-old and the 40-year-old in the commission of the crime of burning a building, also for safety reasons, the evacuation of the entire building where the commercial business was located.
The provision comes after the results of an investigation which, from the early stages, had focused on the only two people seriously injured following the fire, namely suspects 40 and 42, due to serious burns and injuries reported.
It was also discovered, as already in November 2023, that the same exercise had been targeted with a fire that broke out for reasons that remained unclear at the time.
The acquisition and subsequent analysis of the footage from the video surveillance systems in the area and the testimonies of the people present at the time of the explosion then supported the circumstantial framework, allowing us to outline the roles and contributions attributable to the two suspects, the 42-year-old, the role of the person who that night would have purchased a quantity of petrol at a petrol station near his home and who would then have met with the 40-year-old and who would subsequently have gone to the place where the event took place in order to start the fire, started using of the handcrafted Molotov cocktails, thus causing an explosion of such power as to cause injury to the suspects themselves and capable of compromising the stability of the building as well as destroying the furnishings and shattering the windows.
In the charges file, the search of the car used by the 42-year-old, thanks to the discovery inside of tools and objects, according to the prosecution, used to start the fire (two funnels, a roll of drying paper, fragments of latex gloves, petrol station receipt and fabric detergent).
