The blue bow on the door and then, inside the house, colored balloons and lots of sweets on the table around which relatives and friends were gathered.
A surreal scene was found by the investigators of the Flying Squad when they arrived at the home of Rosa Vespa, the 51-year-old from Cosenza, arrested together with her husband, Acqua Moses, 43, from Senegal, for the kidnapping of Sofia, the one-day-old newborn baby kidnapped in Cosenza.
The “pantomime”
A "pantomime" as the chief of the mobile Gabriele Presti called it, staged to celebrate what, in the couple's intentions, was the entry into the house of their first child, Ansel, who in reality was stolen from a clinic. Inside the blue jumpsuit, in fact, the police, who went straight to that house, found Sofia, just one day old, who was thus able to return to her parents' arms after three hours of anguish and terror.
The woman, it emerged, had faked her pregnancy for nine months. A charade that culminated on January 8 in a post on Facebook, the birth of Ansel. A child that no one had ever seen, he was in the clinic for tests, said Rosa Vespa.
The kidnapping
As the days went by, perhaps, she herself realized that the story could no longer hold up and decided to act. In the late afternoon yesterday, she went to the Sacro Cuore clinic with her husband, put a mask on her face and knocked on a room asking if the newborn needed a bath. When the answer was negative, she went to the next room. Here she found mother Valeria with Sofia and the grandmothers. Pretending to be a childcare worker, she took the little girl saying that she needed to see the pediatrician. When she didn't return, the mother became worried and asked for information.
The discovery
That's how the kidnapping was discovered. And immediately roadblocks were set up everywhere in the city, while the Police conducted their investigations. Fundamental to the discovery, explained the head of the Flying Squad, were the description of the woman, knowledge of the territory and video surveillance. In fact, just a few minutes after their arrival, the police viewed two videos, one taken inside the clinic showing the two leaving with the little girl, and one outside that immortalized them leaving on board an Alfa Romeo 147.
Having traced the owner, the agents burst into the man's house and found Sofia. According to some police officers, Moses appeared surprised as well as the guests, unaware of everything. But the investigations on this continue and Presti himself underlined how "he was certainly present at the time of the kidnapping".
The investigations
The investigations will have to ascertain in a more definite manner the motive of an act that has thrown an entire region into panic and a young family, already parents of a 6-year-old boy, into despair. It will have to be understood whether the woman had made inspections in the previous days and planned the kidnapping. The attention of the investigators, in addition to the couple, is also focused on the Sacro Cuore clinic. It was too easy, it is emphasized, to enter and exit with a newborn baby without anyone intervening and investigations are also being carried out in this sense: who was supposed to supervise the entrances and exits, especially the latter, with newborns in tow?
What is certain for the investigators is that Sofia was a "random victim", no contact has in fact emerged "between the little girl's family and the arrested spouses". In Cosenza, the police commissioner Giuseppe Cannizzaro wanted to underline, "there is no one who kidnaps children", it was "a single, limited episode that was immediately resolved".
The terror of parents
Three hours of terror, anguish, desperation, anxiety. An afternoon difficult to forget for Federico and Valeria, the newborn's parents.
Sensations summarized by Valeria on Facebook: "A mom and dad who died and rose again yesterday. I don't think I'll ever get over this, but the happy ending is that she's fine, this is our family that was crumbling into a thousand pieces" under the photo of the little girl kissed by their first son of 6 years with her father next to her.
Joy for having escaped danger and anger for what had happened, Valeria said to a policewoman: "Promise me that they will never leave prison, that I will never see them in front of me again."
After the terrible experience, the family is preparing to return to life within the friendly walls of their home where, perhaps as early as tomorrow, Sofia will also enter. Will she find out one day? "When she's older. Now we want to be calm, serene and forget about yesterday," says the father.
(Online Union)