Lavitola: “The idea of the bomb was Gomes Tavares’s. I just wanted to protect Ranucci.”

“The bomb attack was Clesio Gomes Tavares’s idea, and I take full responsibility for it. Gomes told me he would do things his own way; I had given him carte blanche, specifying that he must not harm anyone.” This is essentially what Valter Lavitola, the confessed instigator of the attack on journalist Sigfrido Ranucci, stated during unsolicited testimony before the Review Court judges, according to his lawyers, Sergio and Arturo Cola. The hearing lasted just over three hours, and the fixer appeared via video link from Rebibbia prison.

“I did all this to protect Sigfrido Ranucci from an assassination attempt I’d heard about. It was necessary to protect him, so much so that I rang Ranucci for two months to ask for his security detail to be beefed up,” continued the fixer. "The key point," the defence lawyers stated at the end of the hearing, "is that the political motive hypothesised by the prosecution is unfounded; as Lavitola reiterated again today, Ranucci never intended to stand for political office and, in fact, often complained that Lavitola was bringing up the subject."

According to the defence lawyers, Lavitola continued before the judges: “I had a very close friendship with Ranucci and I hoped that this relationship might also help to restore my reputation and provide me with social redemption.” The Review Court has reserved its decision on the request for house arrest, for which the lawyers have identified a property in Basilicata that is at the suspect’s disposal. 

The two criminal defence lawyers have requested the release of their client, or, alternatively, that he be granted house arrest. Yesterday they filed a 72-page defence brief ‘the contents of which will form the basis of our defence’. Before Lavitola was heard, Cola explained that the defence would focus on three points of law, starting with the invalidity of the pre-trial detention order, the aggravating circumstance of the ‘mafia-style method’, and territorial jurisdiction ‘which we do not believe lies with Rome’. The arrest of the perpetrators, as stated in the brief submitted by the fixer’s lawyers, “could not have caused Lavitola any fear of being arrested because, as emerged from the investigation files and the questioning of co-defendants, these perpetrators had had dealings only with Clesio Tavares and did not know the identity of the instigator, about whom, in fact, they would only speak in prison after the news of the search suffered by the present applicant had been published”. The lawyers further justify the request for house arrest on the grounds that, “as a result of his confession, Lavitola was attacked by fellow prisoners, and that the Prison Police at Rebibbia Prison reportedly drew up a report regarding the assault he suffered, whilst the co-defendant D’Avino also made statements on the matter during his most recent interview with the public prosecutor”, the document states.