Yesterday, 5 November, in the Koch Room at the Senate of the Republic, a bill was presented to set up a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the deaths of Ambassador Luca Attanasio, Carabiniere Luca Jacovacci and International Co-operator Mario Paciolla.

First signatory and organiser of the event Marco Lombardo, Senator of Action. Together with him were the victims’ relatives: Salvatore Attanasio, Dario Jacovacci, Anna Motta and Giuseppe Paciolla, eager for justice after years of fighting for the truth. Numerous parliamentarians signed, from Susanna Camusso to Filippo Sensi; absent instead was the government majority.

Pictures taken during the ‘Justice and Freedom’ event

Paciolla and Attanasio-Jacovacci: the double thread linking Italian victims abroad

Different times and contingencies, but common dynamics. This is how we can read the stories of Mario Paciolla, Luca Attanasio and Vittorio Jacovacci.

The former, found dead on the morning of 15 July 2020 in his home in San Vincente del Caguán, Colombia, where he had been working as a United Nations Cooperator since 2018.

The other two, Ambassador of the Republic to Congo and chosen escort Carabiniere , victims of a murderous ambush on 22 February 2021 during a humanitarian mission, where Congolese citizen Mustapha Mihambo, driver of the attacked convoy, also lost his life.

Men of the institutions, fallen abroad while honouring their work. Bound together by the opacity and approximation with which the investigations into their respective deaths were conducted, to which is added the reticence of the Italian state in its search for the truth, evidently held back by circumstantial interests and ambiguous bilateral relations.

In this article, giving an account of yesterday’s speeches in the Sala Koch, we will retrace the human and procedural vicissitudes of the victims and their families, finally clarifying the reasons behind the request to set up a special Commission of Inquiry to investigate the death of their loved ones.

The historical truth: Mario Paciolla was murdered

Anna Motta, Mario’s mother, does not mince words when she declares that her son’s death was a ‘disguised murder’.

Paciolla did not commit suicide, as hastily implied by the Colombian authorities. The evidence gathered by lawyers Ballerini and Motta, corroborated by the results – confidential – of an autopsy performed in Italy, suggests that the Cooperante was murdered.

The suicide trail had not convinced from the outset: death by strangulation, marks of beating on the body and a plane ticket to Italy in his pocket. Not exactly a typical suicide dynamic.

Motta denounces ‘little transparency’ on the part of the Colombian police and UN emissaries. “Blatant contradictions, manipulated evidence, ignored clues and intolerable grey areas”, says Paciolla’s mother about the attempts to cover up the case, among them thealteration of the crime scene during the investigation.

‘Mario knew how to listen, in the last months he was worried, restless: he wanted to return to Italy’. According to journalist Antonella Napoli, moderator of the event, he had uncovered and denounced some crimes of corruption within the UN peacekeeping mission between the Colombian government and FARC.

On1 July 2025, the gip in Rome granted the second request by the Public Prosecutor’s Office to archive the murder. This blatantly contradictory decision was arrived at not so much because of the inexperience of the Italian court, but because of theimmobility of our government and theobstacle represented by the diplomatic immunities opposed by UN officials. ‘Today,’ Motta concludes, ‘the state should no longer look the other way, civil society should not tire of keeping an eye on the matter; not only we family members, butItaly deserves the truth, as enshrinedin Article 3 of the Declaration of Human Rights.

Attanasio-Jacovacci murder: an injury to Italy that cannot go unpunished

“He was a man of dignity: he loved the state, we have proved that it was not a kidnapping for extortion but an assault, now we have to find out by whom”.

Words from Salvatore Attanasio, father of Ambassador Luca. “We aspire to parliamentary unity for the establishment of this Commission” … “to the parliamentarians of the opposition, absent today, I ask for the courage that has been lacking until today. Those who abstain are accomplices”.

Dario Jacovacci, Vittorio’s brother, is on the same line: ‘Ignoring the truth about the murder of two serving servants of the State is a betrayal of Italian honour’, denouncing the government’s failure to constitute itself as a civil party at the hearings of the ongoing trial.

Strong interventions, stemming from the tangled affair surrounding the death of the two state servants in Congo. Here too: obscure dynamics, unclear versions of the facts and still no trial truth.

According to an Italian ballistic expert report requested bylawyer Rocco Curcio, this was apremeditated execution, with precise principals different from the local gang members arrested by DRC police in 2022.

Jacovacci denounces the shadows surrounding the affair: ‘the Ambassador wanted to unmask the “Kinshasa System” that was infecting the Italian diplomatic headquarters… corruption in the issuing of visas, shortfalls in funds for development projects in the territory’. However, we will never be able to know for sure what Attanasio was working on in the days before his death, due to the deletion of institutional e-mails ‘perhaps made to disappear by the services’ immediately after the murder.

At the moment, proceedings are in progress against two World Food Programme officials, against whom, as mentioned, the State is not a civil party but, above all, claims diplomatic immunity, thus making it impossible for the investigation to continue.

Honour and dignity: Italy raises its head and ‘makes the state’

“We must honour an institutional political commitment, a civic and moral duty towards the relatives, to ascertain truth and justice, to know the names of the material authors, the instigators and the motives of these murders”. Thus Senator Marco Lombardo, appealing to the Presidents of the two branches of Parliament regarding the start of the constitutive process of the Commission. Defending the dignity of Italian citizens means defending the honour of the State. It is therefore the task of the Chambers, in their inspective function, not to give up in the face of the impunity of the instigators and, as said by the promoter of the similar bill in the Chamber of Deputies, Hon. Marco Sarracino: ‘to obtain State justice’.

The absence of a majority: why the Commission of Inquiry should gain unanimous support

The proposal follows up and gives substance to the unanimous resolution of the Senate Human Rights Commission, which commits the government ‘to take action in all possible fora to continue to demand justice for what happened’. Unfortunately, support for the initiative is not unanimous, with only members of the parliamentary minority among the signatories.

The declaration of intent had been transversal and, says Lombardo, ‘I have personally noted the willingness of numerous honourable members of the majority to support the initiative but, evidently, they are being stopped by a political knot’. A wall evidently raised by the Farnesina to stop any initiative aimed at clarifying the pending issues.

The murder of Italian citizens and statesmen is a political fact, but it must not be subject to public instrumentalisation. To reaffirm the dignity, also internationally, of our country, we need theunity of Parliament and the mobilisation of the consciences of the population. Fundamental in this process, as emphasised by the family members and associations present, is the role of collective presidium and vigilance exercised by the media, which must slowly erode this wall.

In addition to endorsing the proposal for a Commission of Inquiry, The Europeanist Party pledges not to abandon the battle for truth courageously carried on until now. So that, unlike so many, this commission will come to fruition and shed light on shadows that do not only concern the victims, they concern us all.