Cycling, Pantani’s death: the Prosecutor’s Office towards the third request for dismissal

No new elements emerged from the investigations by the Rimini magistrates

Next week it will be 20 years since the death of Marco Pantani and with the anniversary, probably, will also come the request to dismiss the third investigation by the Rimini Prosecutor’s Office into the disappearance of the cycling champion. Whose body was found on 14 February 2004 in a room of the “Le Rose” residence in Rimini and for the third time in 20 years the investigators reached the same conclusion: it was not murder. The investigation by the prosecutor Elisabetta Melotti and the deputy Luca Bertuzzi has not yet been formally sent to the investigating judge’s office as a request for dismissal, but no new elements have emerged.

reactions

“If and when a request for dismissal arrives, we will evaluate the reasons and decide whether it will be worth opposing – said the lawyer Fiorenzo Alessi who represents Marco Pantani’s parents -. From what we know, in recent years the Prosecutor’s Office has investigated thoroughly following the new clues and new leads that we have provided on behalf of the Pantani family”. The push for the reopening of the investigation was a new complaint from his mother, Tonina Belletti, who had declared to the Carabinieri of the investigative unit of the Rimini operations department: “Marco was not alone the night he died, there were two escorts with him” . It was then mother Tonina who provided the Prosecutor’s Office with the names of new witnesses or acquaintances of the Pirate, who had never been heard before. In fact, there were dozens of people interviewed by the investigators and never heard before by those who investigated. But no one seems to have been able to provide certain information, indeed it was often misleading and unreliable information. The taxi driver who brought two cubists to the residence was also questioned in the prosecutor’s office; a private investigator, later deceased, who boasted of knowing things that had never been said; friends, women, even those for just one evening, the service staff of the clubs frequented by Pantani, in short, all those who had been able to have contact with him in the days preceding February 14, 2004. No new leads have emerged.

investigations

Previous investigations concluded that Pantani died alone in a room locked from the inside, mainly due to the action of psychotropic drugs. The latest investigation, coordinated by the prosecutor Paolo Giovagnoli, had in fact ended with a dismissal, after a new medical-legal report at the time entrusted to Professor Franco Tagliaro, establishing that the cycling champion had been destroyed by a mix of drugs and drugs. The dismissal at the beginning of 2016, established with a ruling by the investigating judge of Rimini, Vinicio Cantarini, had held up until the Supreme Court which definitively rejected the appeal.



ttn-14