Ilaria Salis, Mattarella calls her father: 'I am close to her'

President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella telephoned Roberto Salis this morning after yesterday the father of Ilaria, the 39-year-old Italian lecturer detained for over a year in Budapest, had sent a letter to the Quirinale. "He reiterated his personal closeness to me and the family and assured me of his personal interest in the case," explains Roberto Salis. "I thank him for the diligence with which he replied to me in less than 24 hours and above all for his sensitivity and closeness to the drama I am experiencing with my family."

Roberto Salis spoke to President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella for the first time, since he had been contacted on the phone by a Quirinale official after the first pec sent to the head of state on 17 January. 'We are all very happy and Ilaria will be too when I hear from her,' Salis explained, 'it was a very cordial phone call of about five minutes that I was very pleased with and at the end we wished each other Easter wishes.

'I did not expect such a rapid response. I note with pleasure that there are some parts of the institutions that on serious cases like Ilaria's have, in my opinion, the right sense of urgency,' added her father, Ilaria Salis, commenting on Rai News24 on the phone call received from the President of the Republic.

Find other ways because it would not be fruitful to insist on those that ended up against the wall of Hungarian justice. For Roberto Salis, the executive's line, and in particular that of Justice Minister Carlo Nordio, has turned out to be 'a hole in the water'. But there is no intention to stop fighting. The letter ('very dry') was sent to the Colle in the hope that it would 'move the Italian government, because it obviously did not do what it was supposed to do', and Article 3 of the Constitution is also cited since 'all citizens are equal before the law and now the different sentences for my daughter and Gabriele Marchesi have shown that two Italian citizens are being treated differently'.

While the court in Budapest decided that Ilaria Salis must continue to remain in prison, where she has been for more than 13 months now, without being able to serve her house arrest sentence even in Hungary, the Court of Appeal in Milan decided not only not to extradite Marchesi, but also to cancel the European arrest warrant requested by Hungary by releasing the 23-year-old co-defendant for the same crimes as Salis. A decision that in fact complicates the Milanese activist's judicial process, raising the level of confrontation between the courts of the two countries that reciprocally deny the extradition of the two defendants in the same trial.