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‘A terrible affair which cannot go unpunished’: Italy mourns murdered police officer

Hundreds of people gathered on Monday for the funeral of an Italian police officer stabbed to death in an alleged confrontation with two American teenagers that has sent shockwaves through the country.

'A terrible affair which cannot go unpunished': Italy mourns murdered police officer
Mourners hold a picture of Mario Rega Cerciello, who was stabbed to death last week. Photo: Eliano Imperato/AFP

Grieving family, colleagues and friends filled a church in Somma Vesuviana, the hometown of officer Mario Rega Cerciello, 35, who suffered multiple knife wounds on Friday in an attack that the suspects claim was in response to a drug deal gone wrong.

Two Americans, Gabriel Natale Hjorth, 18, and Finnegan Elder, 19, have been charged with aggravated homicide and attempted extortion following the killing in Rome's upmarket Prati neighbourhood.

READ ALSO: Two US teenagers arrested over killing of Italian police officer

Crowds applauded as the hearse bearing Cerciello's coffin arrived at the funeral near Naples, to the solemn tolling of church bells. The casket, draped in the Italian flag, was carried by police pallbearers into the church as a military trumpet rang out.

Deputy Prime Ministers Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio were among the government officials attending the emotional funeral.

A photograph of Cerciello and his wife were placed on the coffin, along with an AC Napoli football shirt. The slain officer had recently returned from honeymoon.


Carabinieri carry their colleague's coffin. Photo: Eliano Imperato/AFP

He was stabbed 11 times with a bayonet knife with an 18-centimetre blade, Italian media reported.

According to police, the suspects say they did not realise that Cerciello and his colleague were officers. They thought they were friends of an alleged drug dealer from whom the pair had stolen a bag which was supposed to contain cocaine but turned out to be crushed aspirin, according to media reports citing investigators.

The victim of the theft tipped off the police, but when two officers in plain clothes went to arrest the two American tourists, one of them allegedly pulled out a knife.


Wreaths left for Mario Rega Cerciello outside the church where his funeral took place. Photo: Eliano Imperato/AFP 

“We have remembered Mario in tears: all the lovely things, the moments spent together. But also the tragedy, a terrible affair which cannot go unpunished,” the mayor of Somma Vesuviana, Salvatore Di Sarno, told journalists.

The US embassy to Italy tweeted its condolences and said it shared “the grief of [Cerciello's] family and the police”.

The funeral comes amid controversy over a picture of the suspects blindfolded and handcuffed while under questioning. 

Giandomenico Caiazza, head of a lawyer's union, said the treatment of the suspects might compromise the interrogation, which police say included a confession.

“There is no doubt that the victim of this tragedy is Mario,” Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Facebook.

However, he said blindfolding suspects “does not comply with our principles and judicial values”.


The chief of the Carabinieri called the blindfolding of a suspect 'unacceptable'. Photo: Vincenzo Pinto/AFP

Neither of the suspects “have shown they have understood the seriousness of the consequences of their behaviour,” Rome judge Chiara Gallo said in her order for the pair to be remanded in custody, according to media reports.

She said the teenagers from California showed “an immaturity excessive even for their young age”.

The pair are being held at Rome's Regina Coeli prison.

Police said surveillance cameras helped them track down the suspects to their four-star hotel where they arrested them. Their bags were packed and they had been planning to fly home the same evening. Officers allegedly found a large knife hidden in the false ceiling of their hotel room.

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CRIME

Amanda Knox reconvicted in Italy in slander case linked to 2007 murder

Amanda Knox was again found guilty of slander on Wednesday, in a retrial in Italy related to her infamous jailing and later acquittal for the 2007 murder of her British roommate.

Amanda Knox reconvicted in Italy in slander case linked to 2007 murder

The American cried in court in Florence as she was sentenced to three years already served for having accused, during police questioning, an innocent bar owner of killing 21-year-old Meredith Kercher.

“I’m very sorry I was not strong enough to have resisted the police pressure,” Knox told the judges.

“I was scared, tricked and mistreated. I gave the testimony in a moment of existential crisis.”

She was 20 when she and her Italian then-boyfriend were arrested for the brutal killing of fellow student Kercher at the girls’ shared home in Perugia.

READ ALSO: ‘I hope to clear my name’: Amanda Knox back in Italy for slander retrial

The murder began a long legal saga where the pair was found guilty, acquitted, found guilty again and finally cleared of all charges in 2015.

But Knox still had a related conviction for slander, for blaming the murder on a local bar owner during initial questioning by police.

In October, Italy’s highest court threw out that conviction on appeal and ordered a retrial, which began earlier this year in Florence in Knox’s absence.

The night she was interrogated was “the worst night of my life… I was in shock, exhausted”, she said on Wednesday.

“The police interrogated me for hours and hours, in a language which I hardly knew, without an official translator or a lawyer”.

“I didn’t know who the killer was… They refused to believe me”, she said.

‘Something so horrible’

Kercher’s half-naked body was found in a pool of blood inside the roommates’ cottage in November 2007. Her throat had been slit and she had suffered multiple stab wounds.

During police questioning, Knox implicated Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba, who then spent almost two weeks behind bars before being released without charge.

Knox was convicted of slandering him in 2011 and sentenced to three years already served.

But she said she was yelled at and slapped during the police investigation – claims that prompted a separate charge of slandering police, of which she was cleared in 2016.

Amanda Knox arriving in court in Florence, on June 5th, 2024. (Photo by Tiziana FABI / AFP)

The police had found a message on Knox’s phone they said was proof she and Lumumba were plotting.

“They told me I had witnessed something so horrible that my mind had blocked it out,” Knox said on Wednesday. “One of the officers cuffed me round the head and said ‘remember, remember!’,” she said.

“In the end… I was forced to submit. I was too exhausted and confused to resist.”

The European Court of Human Rights in 2019 ruled that Knox had not been provided with adequate legal representation or a professional interpreter during her interrogation.

That ruling, which found her treatment “compromised the fairness of the proceedings as a whole”, was cited by Italy’s top court last year when it ordered the retrial.

‘Monster of Perugia’

Knox said last October that at the time of Kercher’s murder, Lumumba “was my friend”.

But Lumumba’s lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, described how Knox’s accusation changed his life.

“When he was accused by Amanda he became universally considered the monster of Perugia,” he told reporters outside court.

Knox was hugged by her husband in court – the same one where she was reconvicted of murder in 2014 – as reporters looked on.

Her murder trial attracted global interest, much of it salacious, focusing on prosecutors’ claims that Kercher died as part of a sex game gone wrong.

But Italy’s highest court, when it acquitted Knox and former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito once and for all, said there had been “major flaws” in the police investigation.

One person remains convicted of Kercher’s murder — Ivorian Rudy Guede, who was linked to the scene by DNA evidence.

He was sentenced in 2008 to 30 years for murder and sexual assault, his sentence later reduced on appeal to 16 years.

Guede was released early in November 2021.

Now 36 and with two young children, Knox is a journalist, author and campaigner for criminal justice reform.

She first returned to Italy five years ago to address a conference on wrongful convictions, appearing on a panel entitled “Trial By Media”.

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