At about 10 one Friday night last month, police inspector Samuele Donatoni was scheduled to have an appointment with a gang of kidnappers. The inspector was meant to "drop" a case of money, probably containing millions of dollars, in return for the release of the industrialist Giuseppe Soffiantini, kidnapped from his home near Brescia, Northern Italy on June 17th.
The police inspector, a member of the specialist NOCS task force, had taken the place of a friend of the Soffiantini family who had acted in a go-between capacity. As far as the police investigators knew, the kidnappers suspected nothing. The police were wrong.
The instructions to the go-between had ordered him to drive his car slowly, to keep close to the roadside guard rail and to drive with the car's internal light switched on. The appointment was fixed for a junction on a relatively quiet country road near Riofreddo, central Italy.
Seconds after the police inspector had stopped the car at the agreed place, he opened the door to get out. His feet never touched the tarmac. The inspector was shot down in a hail of automatic rifle fire so powerful that it burst through his allegedly bullet-proof protective jacket. Donatoni (32) died on his way to hospital.
In the subsequent police operations, at least five members of the gang who had kidnapped Soffiantini were arrested. Despite the arrests and despite a TV appeal from a hospital bed by a wounded and repentant member of the gang, Soffiantini has not yet been found, dead or alive. Soffiantini had been kidnapped at 10 o'clock on a warm June evening as he sat watching a TV concert by the three celebrated tenors, Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras. Three armed men forced their way into the house in an operation that seemed particularly well-timed: the burglar alarm system had been switched off, two guard dogs somehow remained silent and the house staff had the night off.
Soffiantini (62) was a logical target for kidnappers. A one-time shop assistant, he had built up a textile business with a $50 million annual turnover and employing 210 people. He is one of 669 people kidnapped in Italy since 1969 and one of 14 kidnapped in the industrially vibrant Brescia area in the last 20 years.
His case has rekindled public debate about the current legislation relative to kidnapping. Passed in 1991, that legislation effectively freezes all the assets of the victim and his or her family, and furthermore it makes it a crime to attempt to conduct negotiations with the kidnappers.
Official figures would suggest that the 1991 legislation has greatly reduced the number of kidnappings. From 1969 to 1991, 631 people were kidnapped, while from 1991 to this year, there have been 38 kidnappings.
Yet for the victim's family, the legislation can seem a second imprisonment. Tito Melis, father of mother-of-one Silvia (28), kidnapped in Sardinia in February, complained recently that he felt himself under more police scrutiny than his daughters' kidnappers. A police caravan is parked outside his house day and night; all his movements are filmed and his phone calls monitored.
The experience of being kidnapped is often harsh and violent. Since 1969, 93 victims have died during their incarceration. (Ominously a ransom had been paid for 47 of the 93 dead). Victims are held in an astonishing variety of places, ranging from mountain caves in Calabria to city centre apartments, and from tents to deserted buildings in the countryside. Furthermore, they are nearly always moved around.
The Soffiantini family in July received a photograph of Giuseppe in captivity. He had been photographed lying naked on the ground and with severe bruising clearly visible.
Many families, distressed by such suffering, would be more than willing to pay a ransom to secure their relative's release. Since 1991, however, the Italian state has argued that the fate of the kidnapped individual has to be sacrificed for the sake of the greater good of society.
Remarkably, however, and partly in response to the public protests generated by both the Soffiantini and Melis cases, a bill is now to be brought before parliament calling for the payment of ransoms to be (once again) legalised. The bill has been presented by Senator Luigi Manconi, spokesman for the Green Party, who explains: "With kidnapping, we are dealing with what the philosophy of law calls a tragic choice - on the one hand, there is a human life and on the other, the collective good . . . I don't deny that, but when there is an obvious divergency between two public goods then I have no doubt. Protection of the individual's life has to take priority over all other considerations."
Ms Silvia Melis, the woman who was kidnapped last February, escaped her captors yesterday and returned home to a tumultuous welcome in Nuoro, Sardinia. She escaped by climbing aboard a police patrol. Her father told reporters the family had not paid the two billion lire ($1.2 million) ransom demand. --(Reuters)