The prosecutor of the Sassari Public Prosecutor's Office, Elisa Succu, has filed a request to validate the arrest of Domenico Ottomano, the fifty-five-year-old from Bari arrested Tuesday by the police on charges of stabbing fifty-year-old Roberta Mazzone, his nephew's wife, leaving her on the brink of death.
The investigating judge has not yet scheduled the hearing, which will most likely be held tomorrow. Ottomano, assisted by the lawyer Letizia Forma, has already been questioned by the investigators of the Flying Squad and the PM, and has rejected the accusations, claiming that he was arguing with Mazzone about money, that she grabbed a kitchen knife, he tried to disarm her and the woman injured herself by falling on the blade. A version that has not convinced the investigators.
Ottomano was then locked up in Bancali prison while awaiting validation of the arrest and the preliminary hearing. He had also told the same investigators that he had moved to Sassari a few months ago, to get away from his city where he was living in a difficult situation. He was a guest at his nephew's house, that he survived on a pension of 350 euros and that for some time his nephew's wife had been insistently asking him for money to contribute to the expenses of the apartment.
Roberta Mazzone is still hospitalized in intensive care at the Santissima Annunziata hospital in Sassari, where she underwent two surgeries: a kidney was removed. She also suffered a perforated lung, a skull fracture and a deep cut on her head. The coroner will evaluate whether this wound was also caused by a stab or another blunt object. Today the woman's health conditions have improved slightly: she appears alert and cooperating with the doctors.
(Online Union)