After 24 years in prison, Pasquale Tortora, 44, one of the perpetrators of the murder of Graziella Mansi, the eight-year-old girl raped and burned alive on 19 August 2000 in a wood near Castel del Monte, on the outskirts of Andria.
The news is reported by the Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno.
Tortora had been definitively sentenced to 30 years in prison, but was able to benefit from a prison reduction of 6 years for good behavior. Five people were finally convicted of the little girl's crime in 2004. Tortora, twenty years old at the time, confessed and revealed the names of his accomplices, all in their early twenties, and was the only one to be judged with an abbreviated trial.
Four life sentences were instead inflicted on Giuseppe Di Bari, Vincenzo Coratella (who committed suicide in prison on 14 December 2008), Domenico Margiotta and Michele Zagaria. Graziella, daughter of a dried fruit street vendor and a housewife, was kidnapped at the foot of Castel del Monte while filling a bucket with water at a public fountain.
The one who lured her was Tortora, who took the little girl into the nearby woods on the pretext of showing her a litter. Here, according to what was established in the trial, the little girl was taken over by the other defendants who first attempted to rape her and then burned her alive on a carpet of dry leaves.
(Unioneonline/D)