Odd News

Mussolini exhumation unlikely

(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-09-07 09:59

Rome - An Italian prosecutor dashed talk of exhuming the body of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini on Tuesday when he said he expected to dismiss a legal request to investigate Il Duce's death.

The prosecutor of the northern Italian province where official accounts say Mussolini was killed said he did not believe he could open a criminal investigation into the case.

Como prosecutor Alessandro Maria Lodolini said that although he was legally obliged to consider a request for investigation from Mussolini's grandson, the six-decade-old murder had passed the statute of limitations and was subject to a 1946 amnesty.

"We must remember that there was the amnesty," he told Italian news agency Ansa.

The request for a criminal probe was lodged late last month by Guido Mussolini, who doubts official World War Two accounts that his dictator grandfather was executed by a partisan fighter in 1945 while fleeing Allied forces.

The request caused a storm of interest in Italy when Guido Mussolini's lawyer Luciano Randazzo said that prosecutors may choose to exhume Mussolini's body as part of a probe.

But Randazzo and Guido Mussolini have also described as "mistaken" widespread TV, newspaper and radio reports which said that Guido had championed digging up Il Duce.

"I did not request it. I don't want it done," Guido Mussolini told Italian state radio on Tuesday. "I just want to know who killed my grandfather. That's it. Name, last name, where and when."

Mussolini granddaughter and politician Alessandra Mussolini also said on Monday that she opposed an exhumation and said her grandfather should be "left in peace."

After Mussolini was killed, his corpse was moved to Milan and hanged upside down for public viewing alongside his mistress Clara Petacci at a petrol station in Piazzale Loreto, the square where fascists had executed 15 partisans in August 1944.

Speculation about the dictator's final moments has long been the stuff of legend and controversy.

The resistance fighter who captured Mussolini, Urbano Lazzaro, said in 1995 that Mussolini and Petacci had been dead for four hours when their partisan "execution" took place.

Citing a partisan he said had been present, Lazzaro said the couple died some way from the reputed site when Petacci tried to grab a gun from one of the guards escorting them to Milan for Mussolini's planned public execution.

"She was screaming 'They want to kill you'. Two or three shots went off in the struggle and hit Mussolini who dropped in agony. They finished him off on the spot and then shot Petacci for causing the accident," said Lazzaro, who died in January.