After seven hours, the 40-year-old Costantino Contena, the offender for drugs and crimes against property who forced a checkpoint at the entrance to the 131 DCN in Nuoro, turned himself in to the police station.

He didn't want to speak, no words. He would only explain the reason for his first escape: " I escaped at the checkpoint because I didn't have a licence ." For him, the complaint was made on the loose for resistance and driving without a license. And after two hours he was already free at his home, to celebrate his birthday: just yesterday he turned 40.

In the excited moments of the chase at breakneck speed and the shooting, Nicola Catte , 51 years old from Oliena, an agent of the mobile squad of the Nuoro police station, was wounded in the leg, now hospitalized in the orthopedics department of the San Francesco hospital. Catte was grazed by a ricocheting bullet, certainly friendly fire. In fact, at the scene of the shooting, the forensics only recovered shell casings from the weapons supplied to the police.

Shots fired by the agents, therefore, to stop the race of the blue Alfa Mito driven by Contena through the streets of the city and in broad daylight . Which, according to an initial reconstruction, was not armed , but would have risked overwhelming the officers who fired.

After the escape, first by car (in which he lost his cell phone and no drugs were found) and then on foot, a gigantic manhunt was triggered in the city. The pupils of the Liceo Classico were forced to skip outdoor recreation, and the doors of the schools and of a kindergarten not far away were barred. Police and carabinieri, also with the help of the Hunters of Sardinia, have begun to sift through the historic center and the narrow streets of Santu Predu. In the afternoon the end of the searches.

Fabio Ledda

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