A deputy from the party of the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, was involved in a controversy on Tuesday for having brought a firearm to a New Year's Eve party that ended up causing one injury. The altercation has unleashed a scandal in Italy at the beginning of the year.
The Prosecutor's Office announced in a statement the opening of an investigation. The public ministry is examining whether Emanuele Pozzolo, 38, committed a crime. For the moment, he has seized the minigun and the fired bullet. The deputy of the far-right party Fratelli d'Italiade admitted having gone on December 31 with this weapon, a 22-caliber mini-pistol, to a party organized on the premises of a cultural association in Rosazza, a town of about a hundred inhabitants 70 kilometers from Turin (northwest).
“I confirm that the shot was fired accidentally with a legal pistol that belongs to me, but it was not me who fired,” he said in a statement cited by the left-wing newspaper La Repubblica. The 31-year-old victim, who was slightly injured in the leg, was one of thirty guests. It also happens that the organizer of the party was Andrea Delmastro, Undersecretary of Justice.
Prohibited weapons
In Italy, gun ownership is strictly regulated by a gun permit. Pozzolo initially told investigators who responded to the scene that he had “taken out the gun to show it when it was fired,” according to La Repubblica.
The reactions of the political class have not been long in coming. “We could not imagine that the passion for weapons of Giorgia Meloni's party was such that the deputies carried them loaded to the New Year's parties,” denounced the leader of the Democratic Party (PD, left), Elly Schlein, calling the first minister to take “measures against Pozzolo.”
Former centrist Prime Minister Matteo Renzi also questioned the action and referred to “Meloni's ruling class” as “inadequate, incapable, unpresentable and dangerous,” he wrote on the social network X.
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