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Man seized for stealing blood of Pope John Paul II

Italian police in Spoleto said on Friday they had found the presumed thief who stole a church relic containing the blood of the late Pope John Paul II.

Published: 14 November 2020 08:12 CET
Man seized for stealing blood of Pope John Paul II
The relic was stolen from the cathedral in Spoleto in central Italy. Photo: Tiziana Fabi/AFP
The relic of the Polish pope who died in 2005 and was canonised in 2014 was stolen in September from the cathedral in Spoleto, in the centre of Italy.
   
Local police told AFP they filed charges for theft against a 59-year-old man from Tuscany, known to police for having stolen other sacred relics in the past. The man was not arrested.
   
Video surveillance taken inside the church and in city streets helped authorities identify the man.
 
   
The relic remains missing, however, after a search of the man's home revealed no traces of it, police said.
   
The golden cross with a vial of the former pope's blood was given to the Spoleto-Norcia archdiocese in 2016 by the Polish cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, who served for years as John Paul II's personal secretary.
   
The relic was displayed in a niche of the cathedral, protected by an iron gate, whose alarm did not sound after the theft in broad daylight.
   
The alleged thief then headed to the train station where he took two trains to return home.

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CRIME

Italian court cuts sentences of Americans convicted of killing police officer

An Italian appeal court on Wednesday reduced the decades-long sentences of two American men convicted of killing a police officer in Rome while on a teenage summer holiday in 2019.

Published: 4 July 2024 08:41 CEST
Italian court cuts sentences of Americans convicted of killing police officer

Following a retrial ordered by Italy’s highest court that began in March, the Rome appeal court resentenced Finnegan Elder and Gabriel Natale-Hjorth to 15 years and 11 years in prison respectively.

Elder and Natale-Hjorth, from San Francisco, aged 19 and 18 at the time of the killing, were sentenced to life in prison in May 2021 for stabbing policeman Mario Cerciello to death during a late-night encounter.

An appeal court the following year reduced the sentence to 24 years for Elder, who wielded the knife, and 22 years for Natale-Hjorth, who did not handle the weapon but helped hide it.

But Italy’s highest court in March 2023 ordered a retrial to examine potentially mitigating factors, notably that the teenagers said they were unaware that Cerciello and his partner, who were in plain clothes at the time of the attack, were police.

Elder’s lawyers, Renato Borzone and Roberto Capra, said in a statement Wednesday that the court’s decision was “certainly more in line with Finnegan’s actual responsibilities”.

“It is regrettable that we have had to wait through five levels of jurisdiction to see recognised what the young American man has stated since his first interrogation,” they said.

The case horrified Italy and led to an outpouring of public grief for the newlywed Cerciello, who was hailed as a national hero.

But the trial, which revealed multiple examples of police error, offered two very different versions about what happened in the moments just before Elder stabbed Cerciello with an 11-inch (28-centimetre) camping knife on a dark Rome street.

READ ALSO: Italy orders retrial for Americans convicted of killing police officer

While the prosecution’s star witness, Cerciello’s partner Andrea Varriale, testified that the officers were suddenly attacked, the teens said the two men jumped them from behind and did not identify themselves nor show their badges.

The Americans claimed self-defence, saying they thought the men were drug dealers, following their botched attempt to buy drugs earlier in the evening.

Defence lawyers had denounced the life sentences originally given to their clients – Italy’s toughest criminal sentence – saying they were harsher than many given for premeditated killings by the mafia.

The high-profile case also threw a spotlight on police conduct in Italy after Natale-Hjorth was blindfolded while in custody.

The officer who blindfolded him was later handed a two-month suspended sentence.

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