Alberto Stasi, the 41-year-old
serving a 16-year jail term for brutally killing his girlfriend
Chiara Poggi in 2007, has confidence that justice will be served
and the truth will come out, one of his attorneys said on
Wednesday after prosecutors in Pavia opened a new probe, placing
a friend of the victim's brother under investigation for the
murder.
Stasi has "confidence that full light will be shed" on the case,
said the lawyer Giada Bocellari.
"Alberto is very rational, he has at this point served nearly
all his sentence but he wants justice because he has always said
he was not responsible", explained his attorney.
The lawyer also said that Stasi's legal team would not file a
motion for a retrial until the new investigation into traces of
DNA found under the victim's nails allegedly belonging to her
brother's friend, 37-year-old Andrea Sempio, is completed.
The new probe kicked off after new forensic tests carried out at
the initiative of Stasi's legal team found that the DNA isolated
under the victim's nails, which had originally been deemed as
unserviceable by magistrates in Pavia who had investigated
Sempio in 2016, allegedly matched with the 37-year-old's DNA.
Meanwhile the attorney representing Chiara Poggi's family, Gian
Luigi Tizzoni, told ANSA that the ongoing investigation is "the
seventh attempt to revise a final conviction", something he
described as "rare, extraordinary".
"After the final conviction, a total of 40 magistrates have
dealt with the case, all believing in Stasi's responsibility",
added Tizzoni.
In a years-long legal saga that led to Stasi's final conviction,
the former Bocconi business school student was twice acquitted
of the murder before the supreme Cassation Court in 2013
overturned those rulings and ordered a repeat of the
appeals-level trial.
In December 2014, Milan's appeals court convicted Stasi in a
sentence that was confirmed by the Cassation a year later after
the student's family appealed twice.
In 2017, the supreme court rejected another appeal presented by
Stasi's legal team against his conviction.
The last appeal presented by the defence team was rejected in
2020.
According to the judges who convicted him, Stasi took advantage
of Poggi's trust in him to effortlessly murder her in cold
blood.
"Poggi was totally defenceless," the explanation read.
The judges said the student, who was 24 at the time, murdered
his girlfriend because he had come to see her presence in his
life as uncomfortable and dangerous
The Milan court also ordered Stasi to pay one million euros in
damages to Poggi's family, 350,000 euros to each of her parents
and 300,000 to her brother Marco.
The verdict was hotly awaited in the so-called Garlasco case,
referring to the northern town where the 26-year-old was killed,
a high-profile murder that gripped the Italian public at the
time.
Stasi claimed he found Poggi's lifeless body at her family home
on August 13, 2007, the day after the couple had had dinner
there together.
Her family were away on holiday.
He said that after dinner, he left his fiancée at her parents'
home and went to sleep at his own house.
He said he returned the next day because Poggi wasn't answering
her phone, only to find the front door open and her lifeless
body lying in a pool of blood.
Prosecutors said forensic tests carried out on his computer
found that he had not been working on his thesis the whole time
during the morning Poggi was murdered, as he had claimed, and
that crime-scene evidence contradicted this testimony.
Had he indeed walked up the villa's steps as he said, his shoes
would have been covered in blood, prosecutors said.
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