Five hours of hearing yesterday for a very tense confrontation between the former pastor of the victims and the former policeman who carried out the investigations and to listen to four other testimonies, one of which was particularly important.

In Rome the process of reviewing the life sentence inflicted on Beniamino Zuncheddu as the author of the Sinnai massacre (the shepherd from Burcei, now 59 years old, according to the final sentence, had killed three people on 8 January 1991 in the Sinnai mountains) lives a new appointment, the penultimate: in the next hearing, on January 23, there will be requests from the prosecutors and lawyers and then the sentence will arrive.

Difficult moments were experienced in the Court of Appeal when the prosecutor Francesco Piantoni and the lawyers Mauro Trogu (defendant of Zuncheddu) and Alessandra Maria del Rio (civil plaintiff for the survivor Luigi Pinna and his wife Daniela Fadda, daughter and sister of two of the three victims) asked the questions to Paolo Melis and Mario Uda, respectively a pastor once employed by the Faddas and police inspector who carried out the investigations. A face to face wanted by the general prosecutor's office to clarify various inconsistencies in the testimony of Melis who over time provided different versions of the threats received in the second half of 1990 from Giuseppe Fadda, killed together with his father Gesuino and the shepherd Ignazio Pusceddu, in the sheepfold of Cuile is Coccus under Mount Serpeddì on the evening of 8 January 1991.

In the first, after the crimes, Melis said he had learned from Giuseppe Fadda that someone, he was not told who, threatened him by telling him "what you do to my cows I will do to you" (according to the sentence the massacre was born precisely in a context of quarrels between farmers, the Faddas killed their neighbors' livestock that regularly trespassed on their pastures); in the second, a few weeks later, he changed and claimed to have witnessed the episode firsthand; in the third, last November, he confirmed the latter , adding that Giuseppe Fadda himself gave him the name of Beniamino Zuncheddu as the author of the threats and adding that he had been able to recognize the life prisoner through a photo, the only one, which I showed him precisely the Inspector Uda. So to summarize, the PC asked for a comparison.

Melis remained, albeit very hesitant, in the latest version; Uda strongly denied having shown him only one photo but at least four and in any case in the presence of the prosecutor; and he also denied that Melis was the confidential source who had led Zuncheddu to be the perpetrator of the massacre.

Then Francesco Mulas spoke, reiterating what he had already claimed in the 1991 trial: on the evening of the massacre he saw Beniamino Zuncheddu passing through the streets of Burcei on board his Vespino. So it couldn't have been in Cuile is Ciccus. At the time his version was considered unreliable and Zuncheddu's alibi false; it remains to be seen how it will be assessed by the Court of Appeal of Rome. Just wait two weeks and you'll find out.

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