It is July 11, 1992, thirty years and a day ago. In the middle of the night the kidnapping of little Farouk Kassam ends, taken by four criminals on January 15 in the family villa on the Costa Smeralda when he is just 7 years old and released without a piece of ear after six months of imprisonment. Treated like an animal, psychologically worn out, physically crippled, the child is released in the Cedrino valley and embraces his father Fateh in a tunnel near Nuoro before being taken to the house in Pantogia, a few kilometers from Porto Cervo, where the mother Marion Bleriot and little sister Nour, 5 years old. The end of a nightmare and the beginning of the manhunt throughout the island to capture the perpetrators, while dark characters such as Graziano Mesina are already circling around the crime scene. The former red primrose of Sardinian banditry, condemned and fugitive for years, reveals the happy ending to the Rai1 Tg and that the release came thanks to the payment of the ransom. There is talk of 5 billion lire (in the last letter delivered to the parents, on June 16, the kidnappers asked for 10), although investigators and investigators immediately specify that (according to them) nothing was paid because the release arrived thanks to the pressure exerted by the police. The kidnappers felt encircled and preferred to let go of an uncomfortable burden.

The sentences

It will then emerge that Mesina had given himself the role of mediator and that the leader of the gang was Matteo Boe from Lula, then a fugitive. Captured three years later in a hotel in Porto Vecchio, Corsica, by the agents of the Sassari Mobile Squad, he had a roll of film in his pocket whose photos, later developed, showed him in front of a cave on Montalbo (recognized by Farouk as his prison ) and with fellow countrymen Ciriaco Baldassarre Marras, arrested shortly after, and Mario Asproni, who in turn ended up in his cell after a short hiding. In the end, Boe was sentenced to 20 years at the end of the shortened trial, while Asproni and Marras were given 30 years. Lula's former fugitive returned to freedom in June 2016 and published a sort of autobiography (even the Mamoiadino Annino Mele, involved in murders and kidnappings, became a writer); Mesina, who after having spent almost 40 years in prison in 2004 had obtained a pardon from the Head of State, has been serving another 30 years for drug trafficking since December (final sentence of July 2020) after a year and a few months in hiding. The rest of the gang fell silent. No one has ever been able to identify it.

A long season

The kidnapping of Kassam was followed by those of Miria Furlanetto (July 1993), Giuseppe Vinci (December 1994), Ferruccio Checchi and Vanna Licheri (May 1995). In February 1997 in Tortolì it was the turn of Silvia Melis, who freed herself nine months later, and in September 2006 that of the breeder Titti Pinna di Bonorva, held hostage in Sedilo and fled the following May. Then nothing more. But if one of the worst criminal activities seems to have ended, replaced by other forms of delinquency including lightning-fast kidnappings, drug trafficking and robbery of security carriers, not all of its protagonists have paid their bills with justice. There are several fugitives still in circulation.

The fugitives

There is Attilio Cubeddu from Arzana, 73, in the bush since 1997, considered among the most dangerous by the Ministry of the Interior: he must serve 30 years for the kidnapping in Manerbio, Brescia, of the Lombard entrepreneur Giuseppe Soffiantini (June 1997). But, among others, there is also the contemporary Mario Sale di Mamoiada, who has disappeared since 1977 (he has to serve 30 years for kidnapping, murder and evasion); 75-year-old Giovanni Tola di Borore (vanished in 1985), Orazio Fancello di Talana (September 1992), sentenced to 16 years and 8 months for the kidnapping of Esteranne Ricca (1987) in the countryside of Grosseto; Fausto Floris di Desulo, sentenced to three years and 11 months for the attempted kidnapping, in 1982, of the entrepreneur Paolo Sardo.

An. M.

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