A Tunisian-Italian family involved in
an electoral stunt by Matteo Salvini in Bologna three years ago
when the rightwing League party leader, deputy premier and
transport minister buzzed their intercom and asked if a drug
pusher lived there were convicted of drug offences including
distributing Monday.
The Tunisian father got two and a half years in jail, the
Swiss-Italian mother one year, and the son six months on a range
of drugs offences.
Another relative got three months, while another son was a minor
at the time of the offences and therefore not liable.
The League recently said Salvini, who got heavy flak fo the
stunt during the 2020 Emilia Romagna regional elections, had
been vindicated after the family in Bologna's working class
Pilastro district was implicated in a drugs sweep in the Emilian
capital.
"Time is a gentleman," said Andrea Ostellari, Senate justice
committee chair and the League's commissioner for
Emilia-Romagna.
"Some people should apologise to the League and the people of
the Pilastro quarter," he said.
Salvini was cleared in the case by a court that upheld a
defence contention that the League leader's action was justified
politically in the run-up to regional elections, which the
League went on to lose.
In January 2021 Salvini himself said he had been vindicated
after the parents of the boy whose intercom he buzzed in what
was decried as a dubious electoral stunt were arrested on
suspicion of pushing drugs in the Emilian capital.
Surrounded by a film crew and a crowd of supporters for his
campaign in the Emilia Romagna elections, the nationalist leader
buzzed the intercom of the 17-year-old Tunisian boy in the
Pilastro working-class district in January 2020 and asked if a
pusher was living there.
A police officer reportedly put Salvini in touch with a woman in
the Pilastro district whose son had died of drugs and who led
the former hardline anti-migrant interior minister to the boy's
home.
The boy sued the then opposition leader, who went on to narrowly
lose the regional elections.
Salvini's opponents decried the stunt while the Tunisian
ambassador called it an unacceptable breach of privacy.
Facebook took down a video Salvini had posted of the "raid",
which had enthused his supporters.
On January 27 2021 the boy's parents, a 59-year-old
Tunisian man and a 58-year-old Swiss national, both naturalised
Italians, were arrested on suspicion of distributing and
possessing drugs with the intent to distribute, as well as
possessing counterfeit money and weapons.
Salvini said he had been vindicated, tweeting: "Anti-drugs raid
in Bologna. Time is a gentleman. Drugs are bad for you".
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