Dragana Ahmetovic cries, sobs, collapses in her chair a step away from the judges and her husband locked up in a cage, collapses on the table, almost faints and the prison police are forced to call 118 to ensure appropriate treatment. In a half-empty classroom of the Court of Assizes of Appeal he has just finished confessing the murder of his little daughter Esperanza , killed in December 2018 when she was not yet two years old. A few moments that will forever mark the couple's life: inside the van that was the roof of the family, the little girl "cried screaming" like the other four children and "I was not well after giving birth". So, for reasons impossible to understand, "I stepped on it." That was enough for the child to suffocate. Then the body, what was left of it, was thrown into the Cixerri River. It has never been found. "I'd like to go back," he says, looking into space.
Death and condemnation
The woman had already written several letters in the past, addressed to her husband, in which she apologized for what he had done, and in May 2019 she had revealed what she said also happened to the prosecutor Guido Pani. The investigating magistrate, however, had accused both of them of the voluntary murder, the destruction of bodies, the simulated crime and the arson of the vehicle in which, so the couple had initially said, the little girl had died. In the long run, the various statements made by the parents had been considered unreliable (when investigators and the police had discovered her responsibility for the disappearance, the couple had first spoken of a fatal stake, then of the alleged kidnapping of the child by a rival clan, then of an accidental death due to various pathologies of the daughter) and the judge of the preliminary hearings Giampaolo Casula had imposed 20 years in prison on both of them.
Admission to the classroom
The second degree sentence is scheduled for 10 December. In October, Attorney General Liliana Ledda asked for confirmation of the sentence, then defense lawyers Federico Delitala and Michele Satta spoke. Yesterday in front of the Court (President Paolo Costa, on the sidelines Alessandro Castello) the man was the first to sit and reiterated his "innocence". He claimed that that day he had gone shopping in a supermarket in Selargius and, returning to the van, his wife had told him that Esperanza had suffocated to death by the blanket in which she had wrapped her; he wanted to take her to the hospital but she had convinced him that they would be blamed for the misfortune and Social Services could take their other children away. So they got rid of the body. “I'm still broken. If I had been the one to kill her, I would have already confessed. I would not bear the weight of it ». Then it was his wife's turn. “If I had gone shopping,” he said, “we wouldn't be in this classroom now. My husband wanted to take her to the hospital right away, I said no. '
Andrea Manunza