It was not an accident. There was a man behind the explosion that devastated a residential building in Turin on the night between June 30 and July 1, leaving one dead and five injured. Today, at the end of a lightning investigation, the suspect was arrested by the police on a court order for precautionary custody: for personal reasons, perhaps revenge against his ex-girlfriend, he allegedly started a fire in an apartment on the fifth floor.

But what is certain is that Jacopo Peretti, 33, hit by a powerful flame and found completely charred only after several hours, had nothing to do with it. The explosion occurred around 3:15 in via Nizza 389, in the Lingotto district. Three apartments were destroyed. Part of the building collapsed. The members of a family of Egyptian origin who lived in the apartment next to Peretti's were injured (a 6-year-old girl, a 19-year-old girl, a 24-year-old man and a 45-year-old woman) and a 12-year-old boy from the floor below.

Forty-five people evacuated and hosted in a base camp hastily set up by the Municipality's civil protection in a nearby school. It could have looked like an accident. The classic gas leak. Something, however, had not convinced either the prosecutor Chiara Canepa or the police officers of the mobile squad and the Barriera Nizza police station. The investigations, therefore, immediately took a very specific direction. The investigators' impressions were first confirmed when the firefighters of the provincial command, maneuvering through the rubble, identified the source of the fire.

Other elements were produced by the analysis of the footage from the surveillance cameras scattered around. Finally, the witness statements arrived: first those of the suspect's work colleagues, then those of his own family members. The prosecutor's office requested and obtained a precautionary custody order against a forty-year-old who works as a security guard, assisted by the lawyer Basilio Foti. The case is open for malicious disaster and voluntary homicide. The ex-girlfriend was not present in the apartment because she had left for vacation. Jacopo, the victim of the explosion, had graduated from Newton scientific high school, in Chivasso (Turin), then studied at the University's school of management and economics. He worked for an energy consultancy company and for a gym. And he was a big fan of Torino. Friends and relatives described him as a "sunny boy". His life was shattered. For reasons that did not concern him in any way. Tomorrow in the parish church of Mazzè, where he lived for a long time before moving to Turin, the local community will gather for a moment of prayer and reflection in his memory.