(ANSA) - Premier Silvio Berlusconi firmly denied on Wednesday that his government had abandoned the widow of a southern politician murdered at the weekend.
Responding to remarks from the politician's widow, Berlusconi said: "I sent a message from the government and the interior minister has gone in person to Reggio Calabria. What else was the government supposed to do?" The centre-right premier was speaking a few hours before the funeral of Francesco Fortugno, the deputy chairman of the Calabrian 'parliament', who was shot on Sunday at a polling station in his town of Locri.
The killing, which has been attributed to the Calabrian mafia, has revived charges that state institutions and the government in Rome do too little to fight organised crime syndicates in the south. Fortugno's widow, a centre-left supporter like her late
husband, complained in a press interview on Wednesday that she had received no message of condolences from Berlusconi.
She was also bitterly ironic about Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu's affirmation that state institutions were still actively pesent in Calabria. Pisanu visited the scene of the crime on Monday and held meetings with police chiefs to discuss security in the region where the mobsters have killed 141 people since 2001.
He admitted that the situation in many parts of Calabria was "critical" but resisted calls for the army to be sent in to maintain law and order. President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi visited the region on Tuesday and met Fortugno's wife and family. In a speech, he urged Calabrians to resist the power of the mafia, whose Calabrian version is called 'ndrangheta.
The Italian parliament's Anti-Mafia commission said it will send some members to the regional capital of Reggio Calabria on October 24 on a two-day mission to collect information about the Fortugno murder.
Justice Minister Roberto Castelli, responding to charges that there were too few prosecutors in Calabria, said the problem was not the number but the 'ndrangheta's deep roots in the region. "It's not rue that Calabria has been abandoned," he added.
