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Anti-war graffiti and fire reported at Russian TV presenter’s Italian villas

Vandals lit a small fire and dyed a swimming pool red on Wednesday at two luxury Lake Como villas owned by a pro-Putin propagandist, according to reports.

Published: 6 April 2022 16:31 CEST
Updated: 6 April 2022 18:00 CEST
Anti-war graffiti and fire reported at Russian TV presenter's Italian villas
Anti-war slogans and red paint were sprayed on the walls of a villa in Pianello del Lario, overlooking Lake Como, owned by TV presenter Vladimir Solovyev. Photo by STRINGER / ANSA / AFP

The wo vacation homes on Lake Como owned by Russian oligarch Vladimir Solovyev were targeted by vandals on Wednesday, according to reports.

The words “killer” and “no war” were sprayed onto the walls of one villa in Pianello del Lario, reportedly owned by Vladimir Solovyev, while the swimming pool overlooking Lake Como was coloured red, images from the Ansa news agency showed.

Italian authorities are also investigating a fire at another of Solovyev’s vacation homes in the nearby town of Menaggio.

Arson is suspected as tyres were used to start the fire, Ansa reported on Wednesday.

READ ALSO: Italy expels 30 Russian diplomats over security concerns

Anti-war slogans and red paint sprayed on the entrance to a villa in Pianello del Lario, overlooking Lake Como, owned by Vladimir Solovyev. Photo by STRINGER / ANSA / AFP

The villas, together worth some eight million euros according to the Italian government, are believed to be currently empty.

Solovyev, a prominent radio and television presenter, is considered the Kremlin’s most prolific and enthusiastic propagandist.

He has three villas in the area, all of which have been seized by Italian financial police as part of Western sanctions against those close to Putin.

Local fire chiefs played down the scale of the blaze after Italian media reported plumes of black smoke in the area.

 “Just one team of firemen put out the fire within a very short time,” Como fire chief, Gennaro di Maio, told AFP.

“There is hardly any damage, it was burnt tyres that gave off visible black smoke,” he said.

Firefighters at one of two villas on Lake Como belonging to a Russian TV presenter linked to Putin. Photo: Vigili del Fuoco (Italian fire service)

Menaggio’s mayor, Michele Spaggiari, told Italy’s AGI news agency that the fire appeared to be “a demonstrative act” causing little or no damage.

Spaggiari said Solovyev bought the property about five years ago.

READ ALSO: Italy gripped by mystery of $700m superyacht said to belong to Putin

Solovyev owns two houses on Lake Como that are worth a combined eight million euros, the Italian government said as it announced the property seizures last month.

Police are investigating anti-Russian graffiti at the second property, Ansa reported.

The Italian government said on Monday that it has so far seized over 900 million euros worth of assets belonging to EU-sanctioned Russian oligarchs, including a 530-million-euro yacht.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the end of March urged the Italian government to continue the seizures and to stop the country from being a playground for Russia’s ultra-rich.

“Don’t be the place that welcomes these people,” Zelensky told lawmakers in Italy, which has long been a top holiday destination for Russia’s elite.

“We must freeze them all: freeze their properties, their accounts, their yachts,” he said.

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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.

Published: 5 June 2024 12:33 CEST
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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