Denise Pipitone case: former prosecutor Angioni's conviction for false statements overturned

The Court of Cassation hascancelled the rulings by which the Court of Marsala first and then the Court of Appeal of Palermo hadconvicted the former Marsala deputy public prosecutorMaria Angioni, who had investigated the disappearance of Denise Pipitone, for the crime of false statements to the public prosecutor. A charge that had been triggered after the summary information given in 2021 to the then Marsala public prosecutor Roberto Piscitello, as part of the same proceedings. The judges of the sixth section read out in the courtroom the device with which the decisions of the judges of merit are passed over, to know with what motivations it will be necessary to wait for the filing of the sentence.

Asecond trial for defamation against police inspector Vincenzo Tumbiolo, which had cost her a four-month imprisonment sentence in the first instance, is still pending for the former prosecutor. A decision later annulled by the Court of Cassation, which ordered the transmission of the acts to the Court of Monza for territorial jurisdiction.

At the root of the judicial vicissitudes of the former prosecutor - who was in charge at the Marsala public prosecutor's office of the investigation in the crucial stages of the disappearance of Denise Pipitone, from October 2004 to July 2005 - there is, in fact, a live intervention on 'Mattino Cinque', whose headquarters are in Cologno Monzese, in which Angioni had hypothesised failures on the part of Tumbiolo and other colleagues, accused of having committed errors and omissions during the investigation. An example of this was a search of Anna Corona's home, which had allegedly been carried out in the wrong flat, albeit in the same building as the woman, mother of Jessica Pulizzi, Denise's half-sister, who was later tried and acquitted of the charge of conspiracy to kidnap a minor. Tumbiolo, however, had not participated in that search because he was suspended from duty at the time of the operation. Now, the Court of Cassation has cancelled the one-year sentence imposed by the judges of merit on Maria Angioni, who was sentenced today to one year in prison for false information to the public prosecutor for having maliciously besmirched the work of the police, accused by the defendant of misdirection.

Three statements made by Angioni that ended up in the crosshairs of the investigators as false. The first related to the deactivation of acamera that, according to the defendant, could have brought useful elements to the investigation into the disappearance of the little girl and that was decided by the police without her knowledge. In fact, the camera had been activated, for the first time, at the express request of the police and was allegedly deactivated by decision of the Public Prosecutor's Office, Angioni's office, in 2005.

The second concerns the accusation of leaks of information launched by the former prosecutor, who said that he had decided to withhold the listening of wiretaps from the agents of the Mazara police station because he did not trust them, having discovered that some suspects were informed of developments in the investigation. Instead, the investigation had revealed that Angioni himself returned the task of listening to the interceptions to the police, a conduct that was not consistent, according to the prosecution, with the discovery of leaks.