Bruno Contrada, 94, former police director and number three at the SISDE, died in Palermo.
Neapolitan but Palermitan by adoption, he carried out his career in Palermo and went through all the stages of an investigator, from police director to high-ranking secret service official, over the course of thirty years.
Contrada was number 3 of the SISDE during the bloodiest years of the war against the mafia
At the center of a controversial legal case, he was arrested in 1992 and sentenced to 10 years for mafia association. He was imprisoned, placed under house arrest, and finally released in October 2012, before attempts to retrial his case began.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) condemned Italy twice: first because the prisoner, given his health conditions, should not have been held in prison; second because Contrada should not have been convicted because at the time of the contested events (1979-1988) the crime of external complicity "was not sufficiently clear".
The state compensated him for his wrongful imprisonment with €285,342. "I'm fighting to safeguard the honor of an institutional figure; I haven't lost faith in the state," he repeated.
(Unioneonline)
