'Rita Atria must pay the Rai licence fee', demand 34 years after her suicide
The anti-mafia association named after her fights for reopening of investigations into her death
Rai licence fee for Rita Atria: the State demands 138 euros, but does not respond on investigation
The Italian State has not yet responded to the request to reopen investigations into the death of Rita Atria, but has sent a bill for 138 euros for the Rai licence fee to the registered office of the association that bears her name. This is reported by ANSA Cronaca, citing statements made by Nadia Furnari, vice-president of the anti-mafia association founded in 1994 in Milazzo in memory of the very young justice witness.
"The State does not respond to our requests to reopen the investigation into her death. But it is asking Rita Atria to pay the Rai licence fee," Furnari told the newspaper La Sicilia, which first published the news.
The request, which lacked reference to the association and tax identification number, was delivered to an apartment where no social activities take place and where the licence fee is already regularly paid. "Apparently for the State, Ms 'Rita Atria' has an activity," Furnari added with bitterness.
The association intends to formally contest the charge via certified email, explaining that Atria is deceased and that none of the required conditions exist. Furnari described the episode as the result of bureaucratic "negligence", hypothesising an automated sending, "perhaps managed with artificial intelligence".
Rita Atria was 17 years old when, on 26 July 1992 — one week after the assassination of judge Paolo Borsellino, with whom she was collaborating — her body was found lifeless in Rome, having fallen from a balcony. Her death was filed as a suicide.
For four years the association has been conducting a legal battle to obtain the reopening of the case. Lawyer Goffredo D'Antona, who has been supporting the organisation for years, describes an original 1992 case file that is seriously deficient: "They did not even know that she was a justice witness. There was not even an intervention by the Juvenile Court. As if it were not a person who had committed suicide, but a shadow".
Investigations carried out over the years have found an absence of fingerprints and biological traces. "A long series of inconsistencies," D'Antona concluded, for which the association has asked the Rome Prosecutor's Office to reopen the investigation, hypothesising negligent incitement to suicide "and not excluding other matters". The legal proceeding remains stalled, however.
Source: ANSA Cronaca