The president Giorgia Meloni wrote a letterpublished by Corriere della Sera, to the mother of the journalist Graziella De Palo
Giorgia Meloni responds with a letter to the appeal of Renata Capotortimom of Graziella De Palo, a 24-year-old journalist who the 2 September 1980 she disappeared to Beirut. With Italo Tonihis colleague, should have left for the south of Lebanon but both are disappeared into thin air.
Meloni’s letter to the mother of the missing journalist
“Dear Renata,
I am writing to you from mother to mother but also in my responsibility as Prime Minister, to assure you that I will do everything possible to allow you to have that truth to which you have rightly aspired for over 40 years.
His daughter Graziella could have been my daughter, passionate about her work she went to Lebanon, then very young, in search of useful information for the investigation she was carrying out, together with her colleague Italo Toni, a few days after the Bologna massacre.
It was the darkest period of our Republicthe kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro and the men of his escort were followed by attacks, murders and massacres.
Italy was at the center of international tensions and at the same time hit more than other countries by terrorist groups.
In those years I was too young to understandbut my political commitment is also the result of the emotion that those episodes and then the subsequent death of the hero judges Borsellino and Falcone aroused in me.
I now feel a duty as a mother to the mothers who lost their children in those years of violence and terror, and certainly to her.
I understand that his family viewed at different times, from 2010 onwards, a large part of the documents – previously classified – relating to the disappearance of Gabriella and Italo.
Following the excellent work done in this direction in the past legislature by Copasir with its own survey, I instructed Undersecretary Alfredo Mantovano, who is delegated for the Services, to complete the declassification of the remaining documentsalthough not directly connected to the disappearance itself: they constitute the framework in which the story fits, with particular reference to the relations maintained at the time between Italy and the PLO.
However, these are documents already available to the judicial authority, which has resumed investigations into the case since 2019.
42 years have passed: enough time to look at the past with more balance and serenity, trying to build institutional cohesion on complex but unavoidable issues.
That summer of 1980, your Graziella was only 24 years old.
A young journalist with a passion for the truth.
For you and your family, for our own community, we should cultivate that same passion”.
The story of Graziella De Palo and Italo Toni
Italo Toni he was a 50-year-old famous journalist. He had made a name for himself because in 1968 he had first revealed to the world about Paris Match the existence of training camps for Palestinian guerrillas.
Graziella De Palo had worked for the Radical Party press agency and for theAstrolabethe historic magazine of the PCI independents and wrote for Country Eveningwith the director Giuseppe Fiori who was happy to publish his pieces that delved into the world of secret services.
Graziella and Italo, at the end of thesummer of the 1980had left for the Lebanon to investigate arms trafficking between the Middle East and Italyin the context of Lodo Morothe informal non-aggression pact between the Republic and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine which allowed the Palestinians to use Italy as a base for weapons and guerrillas in exchange for the guarantee of preventing the country from attacks.
The day before disappearingToni and De Palo had gone to the Italian embassy in Beirut to communicate their intention to go south, to the home of thePLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, a Palestinian political organization, considered by the Arab League since 1974 as the legitimate “representative of the Palestinian people”. The trip had been arranged, the contacts were stable and known, a jeep was ready for them. From this point on, nothing more is known about them.
What we do know is that the Italian embassy begins to search for them two weeks after their disappearance and that the Foreign Ministry in Rome opens a file on them in Octoberentrusted to the colonel Stefano Giovannonehead of SISMI (the Military Intelligence and Security Service, was an Italian secret service, of a military nature with responsibility for international security, active from 1978 to 2007) in Beirut and not to Ambassador Stefano d’Andrea.
Giovannone is contradictory: first he says that Graziella is in a secret location with Arab women to guard her, then he changes his story and says that there is no reason to believe she is still alive. At the trial for the disappearance of the two journalists you invoke state secrecy on relations between SISMI and the PLO. Graziella De Palo, in her articles, had dealt with him and, however, without ever mentioning his name, had described him as the contact person for the Italian armaments industries in the Middle East.
The April 18, 1981 Graziella’s family meets Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Damascus: he claims that the journalist is in the hands of the Maronite Christian militia and promises her imminent release. On January 14, 1982, the Rome prosecutor’s office opened an investigation.
In the 1983 the De Palos return once again to Lebanon accompanied by some Italian journalists and meet Aby Ayad, the head of the PLO’s secret services, who once again repeats the story of the Maronite Christian kidnappers, which they however deny.
In the 1985 the Rome prosecutor’s office issues a international arrest warrant for George Habbash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, accused of killing Toni and De Palo. In 1984, however, the then Prime Minister Bettino Craxi had officially affixed the state secret on the affair.
Together with sent for Habbashhowever, the judge in charge of the investigation in Italy had also requested the indictment of Colonel Giovannone and the director of SISMI Santovito for aiding and abetting.
The acquittal of all three arrives within a year for lack of evidence.
Since then this story is not mentioned again until 2009, when Francesco Rutelli, a senator at the time, decides to summon Graziella’s brother to a hearing at the Copasir. A few months earlier, the De Palo family had in fact asked Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to remove the state secret established by Craxi.
The Copasir declares himself in favor and obtains the declassification of over a thousand documents held by the Aise (the new name of SISMI). The available documents do not directly relate to the disappearance of the two journalists nor do they reveal anything relevant about the I praise Moro.
The same thing happens in 2014, when the Renzi government approves the declassification of other documents: nothing relevant, nothing decisive.
The last trace is from 2019, when the Rome prosecutor’s office opens a new investigation and, thanks to an anonymous witness, sets up the thesis that De Palo and Toni were investigating the Massacre of Bologna, which took place exactly one month before their disappearance, along the so-called “Lebanese trail”.
Among the papers of the investigation emerges the name of Abu Azeh Salehmember of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine stopped in Bologna in November 1979 because he was accused of guaranteeing the transport of two surface-to-air missiles intended for Palestinian guerrillas. After this, nothing more.
Now Graziella De Palo’s mother has addressed a appeal to President Meloniwho replied with the above letter.
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