Tortured in the sheepfold: "Someone knew, no one spoke"

The investigation and arrests

The interview takes place under two conditions. The first: no names, even if everyone in Villasor knows his and his brother's identities. The second: no details on many aspects of an investigation that is far from over, aspects still being evaluated and subject to developments.

In the investigation of the District Anti-Mafia Directorate for enslavement, plagiarism and aggravated permanent injuries with deformation of the appearance, the arrests of the owner of the Bruncu Su Laccu agricultural company, Giuseppe Dessì, 44 years old, and his partner, Valentina Littera, 35 , are a significant but intermediate stage. Littera is under house arrest: he serves them in the house next to the company, just outside the town, where the investigators place the torture. Dessì, however, is in hospital, guarded by the prison police: the hospitalization would have been necessary due to the emergence of "previous health problems" but also because last Saturday the farmer would have hurt himself trying to escape the police. To carry out the precautionary custody order issued by investigating judge Ermengarda Ferrarese at the request of prosecutor Emanuele Secci, in addition to the soldiers of the local station, those of Serramanna and the Sanluri radiomobile operations unit and two operational teams of the Cacciatori di Sardegna went into action: a deployment of forces that gives a sense of the importance and danger attributed to the operation. Until the other day, the breeder was subjected to probation: an alternative measure to prison. He is serving a sentence for growing Indian hemp.

Supervised interviews

«My brother – continues the woman – worked for him for seven years». Initially nothing unusual: «I didn't get involved because they had agreed between them: despite his intellectual disability (not "psychological problems") my brother has always managed himself in full autonomy. It wasn't his first job: he's someone who has always worked, morning and evening."

As time passed, the first oddities: «He no longer took his usual walks in the village. And he didn't call. I tried to call him but his phone was not reachable. I asked in town: not even his old friends, with whom he occasionally went for pizza, had heard or seen him again."

It is at that point that the woman began to go to Bruncu Su Laccu: «Several times I was told that she was not on the farm, that she was somewhere with the livestock. By dint of persisting, I managed to see it. Never alone: the boss was always present at the interviews." It was he who answered the questions: «The cell phone? My brother “didn't know how to hold things”, he had lost it. Swollen nose? Was fallen. Another time, some time later, he had a swollen nose again and he didn't have his glasses, which he has always worn: those too were "lost".

The other wounds, the ears deformed by the blowtorch? «On those occasions I couldn't see them: he was always dressed. I asked him if he was okay and he, in the presence of the boss, shyly replied yes. I asked him to come and live in my house: the boss intervened, saying that my brother was an adult and it was up to him to decide where to stay."

A long journey

The spell was broken last October, after a phone call that definitively opened the woman's eyes to what was happening in Bruncu Su Laccu: she returned and, not without difficulty, managed to have her brother handed over. “I said he was in such a condition that he wasn't even able to work anymore and I took him away.” Stop at home and, after undressing him for a good bath and seeing what condition he was in, straight to the hospital, first at the Brotzu then at the Monserrato Polyclinic: «For him to find the courage to start telling, even without naming names, there are took days." Then, for months, from one health facility to another to evaluate and treat his wounds. Finally, the protected structure, outside Villasor. «Now, physically, he is better. Psychologically there is a long way to go. Please, you journalists: don't forget about this investigation."