"Mattarella has placed state secrecy on the Ustica massacre": the Rome prosecutor's office investigates fake news spread on social media

A fake newsborn on social media, spread exponentially. And which is now at the center of an investigation by the Rome prosecutor’s office. Piazzale Clodio is investigating the false news relating to the alleged affixing of state secrecy on the Ustica massacre by the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella. In the file, coordinated by the chief prosecutor Francesco Lo Voiaccusations of offense to the honor and prestige of the head of state and of spreading false news. A report has already been filed in Piazzale Clodio by the investigators who are investigating the case and, as far as we know, the fake message would have left from Italy.

The news is not only false, but absolutely unlikelysince as is known the state secret is the responsibility of the Prime Minister. Last June 30, the press office of the Quirinal underlining precisely this aspect: “The President of the Republic has no competence over state secrecy. President Mattarella has never uttered the words attributed to him” and that “it is despicable and shameful to circulate such lies on the web”. The words attributed to the head of state represent a sort of justification to the decision to place state secrecy on those documents: “The truth about Ustica would hurt“.

Doing a quick search on X it turns out that at the origin of this fake news there are screenshots of some newspaper headlines from August 21, 2020, which however are completely decontextualized in the posts that relaunch them. Those pieces, in fact, report the news of the secrecy until 2029 of some documents relating to the relations between the our intelligence and the Palestinian one in the early 1980s. These are the cards known as the notes by Colonel Stefano Giovannonehead of the center Earthquakes in Lebanon until 1982. Those documents, however, were already “available to everyone in the documentation regarding the Brescia Massacre”, as he said in those days Eugenio Baresi, former secretary of the Massacre Commissionto the daily newspaper The print.