Hamas funds investigation, prosecutor: 'Israeli documents must be usable'

The Genoa Public Prosecutor's Office filed an appeal with the Court of Cassation against the release of one of the Palestinians arrested at the end of December in the investigation into alleged funds to Hamas and then freed by the Genoa Re-examination Court because the evidence against 48-year-old Raed El Salahat, defended by lawyers Samuele Zucchini and Emanuele Tambuscio, stemmed mainly from documents sent by Israel.

Those documents - collected by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in Gaza and the West Bank and catalogued by an Israeli intelligence officer known only as 'Avi' - for the Genoa Re-examination Chamber cannot be used because they come from an anonymous source and were acquired without any procedural guarantees or respect for human rights.

According to the public prosecutor's office, however, 007 is an 'anonymised' source, but not anonymous one, so that the public prosecutor's office is looking for ways to hear him directly between now and the start of the trial.

Secondly, claim Genoa prosecutors Marco Zocco and Luca Monteverde, in order to say that the documents collected on the battlefield were not seized with the necessary guarantees - for example on human rights - it is necessary to prove 'that a coercive act directly affects the genesis of the specific evidentiary element, the context or episodes of torture found in that context not being relevant in this respect'. The hearing before the Court of Cassation is set for Wednesday 8 April.