Trials
Three trials were started for conspiracy against the Italian state. In 1978, Vito Miceli was acquitted of trying to cover up a coup attempt, Saccucci, Orlandini, Rosa, and others were convicted of political conspiracy, which also included Stefano Delle Chiaie, whose specific role is unclear. According to a 1987 UPI news cable, he had already fled Italy to Spain on July 25, 1970 However, according to other sources, including René Monzat (1992), he led the commando which occupied the premises of the Interior Minister. At the appeal trial in November 1984 all 46 defendants were acquitted because the "fact did not happen" (il fatto non sussiste) and only existed in "a private meeting between four or five sixty-years-olds". The Supreme Court confirmed the appeal judgment in March 1986.
The final trial connected with the Golpe Borghese began in 1991, after it was discovered that evidence involving prominent persons (Licio Gelli, admiral Giovanni Torrisi...) had been destroyed by the Italian armed forces secret service before the first trial. Giulio Andreotti, minister of defense at the time the evidence was destroyed, declared in 1997 that names had been deleted so that the charges would be easier to understand. This last trial ended without convictions because the period of prescription for destruction of evidence had passed.
According to the journalist René Monzat, investigations lasted seven years, during which it was alleged that the Golpe Borghese had benefitted from military accomplices, as well as from political support not only from Borghese's National Front or from MSI deputy Sandro Saccucci, but also from other political personalities belonging to the Christian Democracy (DC) and to the PSDI (Italian Social-Democrat Party). According to Monzat, investigations also discovered that the military attaché at the US embassy was tightly connected with the coup organizers and that one of the main accused declared to the magistrate that US President Richard Nixon had followed the preparations for the coup, of which he was personally informed by two CIA officers. These facts were confirmed through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica in December 2004. However, only a few marginalized sectors of the CIA were in favour of the coup, while the main response was not to allow major changes in the geo-political balance in the Mediterranean.
Read more about this topic: Golpe Borghese
Famous quotes containing the word trials:
“All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences are sentences of death.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
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—Christina Stead (1902–1983)
“... all the cares and anxieties, the trials and disappointments of my whole life, are light, when balanced with my sufferings in childhood and youth from the theological dogmas which I sincerely believed, and the gloom connected with everything associated with the name of religion, the church, the parsonage, the graveyard, and the solemn, tolling bell.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)