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Alfredo’s fault

This article is published in issue 49 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 6 December 2022

Imagine living alone inside a tomb, and coming out only for the hour of fresh air, to be spent inside a concrete tank with very high walls, in a hot place in summer and humid in winter, covered by a net of metal through which only a piece of sky can be seen. It doesn’t surprise me that a person subjected to this regime, considering it unfair, decides to risk his life in order to make his situation known. It’s already bad, terrible – there have been eighty suicides so far this year, more than ever, and one hundred in the last ten years have been those of prison police officers because in prison it’s not just the prisoners who are sick -, let alone what it is like to be subjected to similar treatment to atone for the guilt of one’s political ideas and the actions related to those ideas. Alfredo Cospito is an anarchist and he didn’t kill anyone. He began his hunger strike a month ago (he has already lost over twenty kilos) because after ten years in a “high security” regime he received a change of charge from the Court of Cassation for which he has been subjected since the beginning of May, in prison di Bancali in Sardinia, under the regime provided for by article 41-bis, and risks life imprisonment, or until he dies. The type of crime that has been attributed to him is that of “massacre against the security of the state” – an accusation that was not even applied to the perpetrators of the attacks that killed the judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino – for two low-potential devices that exploded one night sixteen years ago, which had caused no deaths or injuries or serious damage. Alfredo Cospito in these years in prison has collaborated on two books and magazines of the anarchist movement, but since 5 May the 41-bis regime has forbidden him any contact with the outside world, both incoming and outgoing. On Thursday 1 December the complaint against the application of the 41-bis presented by his lawyers will be discussed in Rome. Let’s hope he gets there alive.

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Source: Vanity Fair

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