Ilaria Alpi would be 60 today: “May her story teach us indignation”

Every year, on May 24th, Ilaria Alpi’s parents brought white roses to her grave, there is also one that bears her name. They would have done it again this year, perhaps with a particular thought. Ilaria Alpi would have turned 60 this year. His parents are gone. She has not been there since 1994. It was March 20 when Ilaria and Miran Hrovatin, a journalist not even 33 years old and a Tg3 operator, were killed in Mogadishu, Somalia.

There is not even that truth that Ilaria’s family has never stopped asking for.

“I’m not looking for justice, I just want to know the truth,” said Luciana Alpi. The case of her daughter and Miran Hrovatin is still an open case. The instigators of the murder of the Tg3 correspondent in Somalia and of the operator are missing, killed not far from the Italian embassy in Mogadishu by a volley of Kalashnikovs.

That ambush is the final image of Ilaria Alpi. The girl who wanted to tell about hell, book published by Rizzoli and written by Gigliola Alvisi. It is a children’s book that tells the story and Somalia and in the preface by Mariangela Gritta Grainer reconstructs what came after.

No certainty came from trials and parliamentary commissions on who had ordered the murder, but also on who were the seven men of the commando who fired on the journalists’ car. There are no prove, but it soon became clear that Ilaria and Miran’s work was the cause of their deaths.

They were in Somalia to document the return of the Italian contingent to their homeland, but there was also another investigation into the trafficking of weapons and toxic waste between Italy and Somalia. Local warlords and ships from Italy would have been involved. A week before they were killed they had met Abdullahi Moussa Bogor, “lord” of the city of Bosaso. Theme of the interview a ship hijacked by pirates that may have been used for illicit trafficking. The Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office has asked for the investigation to be closed three times, requests that have always been rejected.

“He had always struck me for his alternative attitude, the informal clothing when many television journalists were still of a formal elegance”, says Gigliola Alvisi who did not know personally, but admired her parents who “indomitable they continued to ask for truth and justice with pride, sobriety and elegance ».

“There is a double story of Ilaria: the first ends on March 20, 1994, the second begins with this date it is made up of misdirections, of offenses against the family, a repeated and constant wall of rubber with respect to the requests to discover the truth. The more you dig into this story, the more bewildered you are. The story of Ilaria and Miran is like a contagious disease: you can’t help but work on it if you come into contact with them, “he explains.

«It is a story that seems distant, but in fact it is not. We are still waiting for truth and justice despite the fact that many try to oblivion this story because the interest of some prevails over the collective one and over justice “, concludes Gigliola Alvisi,” In schools they often ask me if the meaning of this story is that to do good journalism you have to die. No, that’s not it, Ilaria wasn’t and didn’t want to be a heroine. He didn’t want to risk or die. This affair is a training ground for indignation, a collective feeling that must be trained».

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