Seals at the Piper, the historic Roman discotheque subjected to preventive seizure

Seals at the Piper, the capital's historic discotheque. The seals were put in place after a check linked to the tightening of controls to check the safety of public premises, to avoid massacres like the one in Crans Montana. The discotheque, opened in 1965, was one of the historic venues of the 1960s boom. It soon became the centre of the Roman high life.

The venue in Via Tagliamento, Rome, was subject to preventive seizure, which will have to be validated by the judicial authority. Inside, the police allegedly found structural modifications to the facility, evacuation risks, a lack of certifications, and a higher number of people than was due. The Questura's checks on the premises in Rome have been going on for some time and have continued since the Crans-Montana tragedy.

The crackdown on nightclubs had already begun with the seizure on 17 January of three nightclubs in the centre of Rome. The three businesses seized this morning are all located at the intersection of Via del Tritone and Via degli Avignonesi, on the corner of Piazza Barberini, in the heart of the capital. Each venue was on a different floor of the same building: in the basement was the 'Toy Room' disco, on the ground floor the 'White Bar' and on the first floor 'Clamore'.

In the meantime, investigations in Switzerland into the Crans Montana tragedy have revealed that the owner Jessica Maric, who is under a signature order, allegedly took mobile phone footage of the New Year's Eve fire that destroyed Le Constellation. The woman was allegedly captured on video by some of the club's customers, filming the line of waiters with sparkling bottles and the start of the fire, which killed 40 people, including six Italians (Names of the Victims: Chiara Costanzo, 16, from Milan; Achille Barosi, 16, from Milan; Giovanni Tamburi, 16, from Bologna; Riccardo Minghetti, 16, from Rome; Emanuele Galeppini, 17, from Genoa; Sofia Prosperi, 15, from Italy-Switzerland). There were 117 injured. A version with several witnesses, including one of the waitresses who survived the fire. Jessica, however, had declared in her interrogation with the Swiss magistrates that she had no video of the evening of the massacre in her mobile phone. People were not shouting, many had not seen the flames.

Meanwhile, the prosecutor's office in Sion received an application from lawyer Jordan accusing the magistrates of wasting time by allowing the Moretti couple to delete crucial evidence. Starting with the club's social accounts a few hours after the fire, while they were still working to save the victims. The phones of the two were only seized on 9 January, after the lawyers' requests.