Erba Massacre

On the evening of 11 December 2006, at around 8:20 p.m., at number 25 of via Armando Diaz in Erba, a fire broke out inside one of the apartments of one of the buildings that compose it, known as the Ice condominium. Two neighbours, one of whom was a volunteer firefighter, entered the building first to rescue any people trapped inside. Near the landing they found an injured man, sixty-five-year-old Mario Frigerio, and dragged him by the ankles away from the fire. Upon entering the apartment, the rescuers found the lifeless and burning body of Raffaella Castagna, a thirty-year-old part-time employee in a community for the disabled. They managed to carry him to the landing and then tried to assist the injured elderly man. At a certain point, the rescuers heard a woman's cries for help and Frigerio managed to communicate in a faint voice to the rescuers that his wife was on the upper floor; however, due to the smoke, those present were forced to abandon the building. Subsequently, the firefighters arrived, put out the fire and found three more bodies. They were Paola Galli, a fifty-seven-year-old housewife and mother of Raffaella; Youssef Marzouk, the woman's young son and Valeria Cherubini, Frigerio's fifty-five-year-old wife. The investigations reported the causes of death as follows. Raffaella Castagna, surprised in the hallway in front of her front door, was repeatedly hit with a crowbar and stabbed twelve times before finally having her throat slit. She died from severe head injuries, including a fractured skull, caused by blows from the crowbar. Her mother Paola Galli was attacked in the hallway of the home and suffered six stab wounds and six crowbar blows (damaging blows to the skull). The youngest victim two-year-old Youssef Marzouk died on the sofa in the living room from blood loss after receiving two stab wounds, one of which was fatal to the throat that severed the carotid artery. To hide the traces of the crime, the apartment was then set on fire, but the amount smoke that developed inside forced the attackers to flee the apartment towards the condominium stairs from which the Frigerio-Cherubini couple were coming down. They had been attracted to the Castagna apartment by the smoke that was coming out from under the door. Valeria Cherubini was found in her apartment which was located in the attic of the building. After having rushed to a lower floor, on the condominium stairs she had a prolonged altercation with the attacker and was seriously injured by thirty-four stab wounds and eight blows from a crowbar However, the injuries were not as damaging as for Castagna and Galli, allowing her to go back upstairs to the upper floor. She was still alive when the first aid arrived brought by the neighbours, and she had tried to attract their attention with calls for help, but the rescuers were unable to intervene due to the smoke rising from the fire downstairs in the Castagna apartment. She then died, together with the family dog, due to the inhalation of carbon monoxide, which had by-then concentrated in her apartment. Her husband Mario Frigerio was also the victim of an attack on the condominium stairs, being beaten and stabbed in the throat, but managed to survive thanks to a birth defect of his carotid artery which preserved him from fatal bleeding. The forensic evidence revealed that there had been two attackers, one of whom was left-handed. They were each armed with two short-and long-bladed knives, as well as a crowbar. == Investigations ==

Azouz Marzouk The police investigations initially focused on Azouz Marzouk, a native of Zaghouan, Tunisia, husband of Raffaella Castagna and father of Youssef. Marzouk, who according to the press had a criminal record for drug dealing and had been released from prison thanks to the 2006 pardon. He was in Tunisia visiting his parents at the time of the crime, and after having hastily returned to Italy, he was interrogated by the Carabinieri. The investigators confirmed his alibi and began to suspect that a settling of scores had been carried out against him. Olindo Romano and Rosa Bazzi Among the other leads followed, the anomalous behaviour of two neighbours of Raffaella Castagna, who in the past had legal disputes with the Castagna household, was immediately noted. Despite the disconcerting events that had occurred, already from the first hours after the murders the Romano couple showed themselves disinterested in the events and, unlike the other inhabitants of the courtyard and the condominiums, did not ask for reassurance from the police. These suspicions led the investigators to seize some of the couple's clothing and to put the house and the car under surveillance. Already in the first night after the massacre, other facts attracted the attention of the investigators. Both of them had injuries consistent with a fight (the husband a bruise on the hand and one on the forearm, the wife a wound already healed on a finger). Furthermore, when asked the usual questions immediately after the massacre, the two showed a McDonald's receipt. This was rather suspicious, as it showed an immediate attempt to appear at all costs to be extraneous to the incident, when the police had not asked any questions about it. The couple were accosted by police on 8 January 2007 and arrested after a long interrogation the following day. They were described as two very closed and isolated people, morbidly attached to each other. During the investigations, some of Rosa Bazzi's relatives claimed that the woman had been sexually abused by an acquaintance (perhaps a relative) at the age of ten, without ever receiving any kind of assistance or support following this. Investigating Olindo Romano's past, however, revealed a complaint filed against him by his father and brother at the beginning of the eighties, following a fight for family reasons. In fact, at the time of their arrest, Romano and Bazzi had already cut off any relationship even with their closest relatives for years; a psychiatrist, a consultant for the defense, later claimed that it was appropriate to evaluate Bazzi's IQ, in order to establish her capacity to understand and want. Romano was charged with aggravated multiple homicide, his wife with complicity. It was then the RIS findings that indicated the presence of a second person in the massacre, left-handed like Bazzi. The investigators traced the frequent disagreements between the Romanos and Raffaella Castagna, which also resulted in an argument on New Year's Eve 2005 and in a civil case between the parties. A hearing of which was supposed to take place two days after the massacre. On that occasion, the Romanos allegedly attacked and beat Castagna, who filed a complaint against them for insults and injuries after an argument that broke out that evening, even though she offered to withdraw it in exchange for financial compensation. The episode, however, was only the latest in a long list of hostility and rudeness between the tenants, which frequently resulted in arguments and fights. The spouses reiterated their innocence and declared that they had spent the evening in a McDonald's in Como, for which they also kept the receipt. This time however, was two hours before the massacre, and the usual dinner time of the couple. The investigators immediately suspected a clumsy attempt by the couple to obtain an alibi. On 10 January 2007, before the magistrates, the Romanos admitted, taking full responsibility separately, to being the perpetrators of the massacre, describing in detail the individual acts, the type of wounds, the positions of the victims' bodies and the type of weapons used. The confession was reiterated during the validation of the arrest by the GIP and the details described were considered decisive since they could only be known by those who had experienced the crime scene. In particular, the initial position of the victims' bodies at the end of the assault (and therefore different from the final position in the photo of the bodies on the landing), later confirmed by scientific investigations, could only have been known by the material perpetrators. The testimony of Mario Frigerio, the only survivor, was also used against them. == The processes ==

Preliminary hearings On 10 October, in front of the (GUP) who had to decide whether or not to open the trial, Olindo declared himself innocent and retracted his confession. His wife Rosa also retracted her statements. The relatives of the victims rebelled in the courtroom,and the judge was forced to suspend the session. Azouz Marzouk asked for the death penalty for the two defendants, even though it is not provided for in the Italian legal system. The prosecution, represented by the PM Massimo Astori, considered the Romanos' retractions as a simple variation of the defence strategy. On 12 October, Olindo Romano and Rosa Bazzi were . First degree The first hearing was held on 29 January 2008; during the hearings, the Romanos spent the time exchanging words and giggling with each other, even during the projection in the courtroom of the photographs of the body of little Youssef. On 18 February 2008, Olindo accused the Carabinieri who had interrogated him of having brainwashed him and convinced him to confess, promising him in exchange a few years in prison and the immediate release of his wife Rosa. During the same days, their neighbours testified before the Court that the Romanos had created a climate of terror in the condominium with furious arguments, verbal threats, throwing vases onto other people's terraces and letters from lawyers. The police even had to intervene several times and several tenants of the building had preferred to move elsewhere to avoid further arguments. A neighbour would later say that, shortly before the massacre, Olindo Romano had given her a mass of handwritten pages containing their version of the arguments with Raffaella Castagna and her family, asking her to type them for him. The defence attempted to argue, without however proving it, that on the same day of the massacre a stranger was present in Raffaella Castagna's home. Testimony of Mario Frigerio While at first, from his hospital bed, Mario Frigerio indicated that his assailant was an unknown person, with an olive complexion, during the proceedings he testified as the only eyewitness, recognising Olindo Romano as his attacker. In the courtroom, during the trial, tensions arose between the prosecution and the defence, in particular during the cross-examination of Frigerio by the Romano lawyers. After some insistent questions from the defence who attempted to cast doubt on his credibility and to paint him as a false witness, Frigerio turned to them exclaiming "shame on you!" and calling Olindo Romano a "murderer"; the judge then suspended the hearing. Further retractions by Romano On 28 February 2008, Olindo Romano made a second spontaneous statement, insisting on the alleged brainwashing he hypothesized and declaring that he had been "treated like a beast" in the Como prison; he asked not to be separated from his wife. The testimonies of the carabinieri who interrogated him - and confirmed by listening to the recordings made - revealed instead that Olindo and Rosa confessed, telling them that they wanted to free their consciences. His wife, who was also supposed to make statements, declined because, according to her lawyers, she was deeply affected by the accusations made against her by Frigerio. Rosa will speak at the trial, in the following hearing on 3 March 2008: in her deposition she will declare that she confessed after being promised house arrest. She also claimed that she had never gone up to Raffaella Castagna's house and denied having ever had any arguments with her, claiming instead that she had tried to help her when she needed it, a circumstance also denied by some of Castagna's friends, who also reported that Raffaella had told them about being followed by the Romano couple even a few days before the massacre; the couple denied having wanted to follow her, but the prosecution then used this event as proof of the beginning of an escalation of intimidation against Castagna. On 31 March 2008, the defence, invoking the so-called legitimate suspicion , asked to move the trial away from Como because the local media would have had a hostile attitude towards the defendants. The request was rejected. On 2 April 2008, the first statement of Mario Frigerio was heard in court. Although seriously injured, he accurately described the dynamics of the massacre. It was interpreted as a confirmation of the Romanos' guilt. The defence then asked for the judges to be challenged, claiming that they had prejudicial positions towards the defendants. The trial was suspended again. On 17 November 2008, the Supreme Court of Cassation rejected the judges' recusal. The trial resumed with the prosecutor's closing statement; the magistrate retraced all the stages of the affair, describing it as a "journey of horror". Evidence against the Romanos was presented, starting with traces of blood with the DNA of one of the victims. At the end of the closing statement, Astori asked for the maximum sentence for the couple: life imprisonment without extenuating circumstances, with three years of solitary confinement. For the prosecutor, the Erba massacre was one of the most atrocious crimes in Italian history. On 19 November 2008, Olindo made his third spontaneous statement, claiming that up until that point he had been playing the part of the monster, and that this act included the confession given to a psychiatrist and the sentences left on purpose in a Bible in his possession, containing insults and invectives against the victims, declarations of love to his wife and poems. The civil parties asked for a total of €8,000,000 in compensation. Judgement Olindo subsequently released a fourth spontaneous statement, reaffirming his and his wife's innocence and expressing his condolences to the victims' families. The Court of Assizes of Como issued the first-instance sentence on November 26, 2008: the Romanos were sentenced to life imprisonment with three years of solitary confinement. The Court also established a compensation of €500,000 for the Frigerios, €60,000 for Marzouk and €20,000 for his parents living in Tunisia. Second degree and appeal On 20 April 2010, the Court of Appeal of Milan confirmed the life sentences for the spouses Rosa Bazzi and Olindo Romano, with the additional punitive measure of three years of daytime isolation, the maximum permitted by law. == Cassation ==

Two appeals were lodged against the sentence, one of which was based on 40 grounds of legitimacy; the Supreme Court presented it as the result of " an operation of vivisection of the trial, so that each single step of the process was considered flawed, sometimes under several aspects". On 3 May 2011 the sentence sanctioned the rejection of the appeals. The at the Court had requested the confirmation of the second instance sentence. The Supreme Court stated that all the defence arguments must be rejected, since it was not possible to undermine "the solidity of the foundation on which the very painful story had been reconstructed". In particular: • the circumstance that the only witness of the massacre, Mario Frigerio, did not immediately recognize Olindo does not constitute — for the Court — a sure and incontrovertible indication of his unreliability, also considering that: • The circumstance that the only witness of the massacre, Mario Frigerio, did not immediately recognize Olindo does not constitute — for the Court — a sure and incontrovertible indication of his unreliability, also considering that: • any complaints about the presence of the blood stain on the Romano couple's car - in particular, about the possibility of "contamination" (in the sense that someone else, who had previously been at the crime scene , could have transported the blood material to the car) and about the lack of scientific documentation relating to the investigation operations carried out by the Judicial Police - are completely unfounded: • With regard to the confessions of the two defendants - according to the defence heavily influenced by the actions of the Carabinieri and the public prosecutors, and therefore unreliable - the Court observes that: • with regard to the circumstance that the two lower courts underestimated alternative paths, the Court notes that: == Developments and legal appeals ==

Rosa Bazzi is serving her sentence in Bollate prison, while Olindo Romano is serving his sentence in Opera prison; the two are allowed to meet once a month. In April 2011 Azouz Marzouk changed his mind, claiming that the Romanos were not the culprits. It was later reported that Azouz Marzouk himself had been sued by the victims' family for having violently addressed, with unkind and incorrect terms, the victims' family. In September 2012, Azouz Marzouk filed an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), because he had identified what he claimed were numerous procedural defects in which the judges had incurred in all three levels of judgment. The European Court declared the appeal inadmissible. He appealed again before the same Court, but it was again rejected for the same reasons. In August 2014, the couple ended their daytime isolation, which had been inflicted on them in the three levels of judgment. About a month later, Mario Frigerio, the only survivor of the massacre, died at the age of 73 in his home in Como after a long illness. In March 2023, Azouz Marzouk was sentenced for defamation to pay €70,000 to Giuseppe and Pietro Castagna, the brothers of Raffaella Castagna, after suggesting in an interview that the Castagna family was responsible for the massacre. The appeal to the European Court of Human Rights In September 2012, the '''' reported the news of the appeal - already announced after the final conviction in the Supreme Court The appeal was declared inadmissible due to an absolute lack of jurisdiction. The defence renounced the subsequent appeal to the same Court as it did not consider a favourable outcome to be probable. The possibilities of appeal to supranational bodies were therefore exhausted. A few months earlier, Azouz Marzouk - considering some passages of the conviction sentences to be contradictory - had also instructed his lawyer to appeal to the same Court. In two different sentences, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) declared inadmissible the appeal presented by Azouz Marzouk's lawyer for abusive exercise of the right to act, since he was not listed as an injured party, and according to the legal system, only those who believe they are the victim of a violation by the State of one of the rights and guarantees recognised by the Convention or its protocols can appeal to the Court, furthermore it declared inadmissible the subsequent appeal to the same Court for the same reasons. Requests for a review of the process • on the basis of the statements of Azouz Marzouk who, after the trial, believes the couple was unjustly convicted, provoking, among other things, the indignation of the relative of the victims Carlo Castagna; • on a lead - never followed before - that sees as culprits of the massacre people belonging to organised crime gangs ('''Ndrangheta''), in any case of non-Arab nationality. This hypothesis was reported to Azouz Marzouk's mother by a man, at the time not better identified, who went to Tunisia to report this particular circumstance; • on the basis of the summary information (never taken into consideration) given by the witness Ben Brahim Chemcoum, questioned at the time of the events by the Carabinieri of Erba, who reported — five days after the massacre — that «he had seen, around the time of the massacre, two people in front of the courtyard in via Diaz where, after the murders, the fire had been set. On Christmas Day 2006, Chemcoum had returned to the Carabinieri reporting that he had seen "a Tunisian and an Italian" with "a beret", voices shouting "murderer" and "help me", of a man with a "hurried step" who seemed to him to be "mad" and of "petrol". The Tunisian even indicated one of the people seen, without naming him, as "the brother of the dead woman", that is, Raffaella Castagna, wife of Azouz Marzouk. The lawyers filed a motion to request new investigations, but the Como and Brescia prosecutors declared themselves "not competent". In April 2017, the Court of Cassation admitted the re-examination of seven pieces of evidence at the Court of Appeal of Brescia, granting that Court the power to conduct an evidentiary incident. After the lawyer requested an extension on the destruction of the evidence, the public prosecutor instead requested in July the destruction of such unexamined items, which was however blocked by the court at the request of the Romanos' lawyer. On the morning of 12 July 2018, on the basis of an order issued by the Court of Cassation, all of the items not yet analyzed, part of which, those in custody at the Office of Crime Evidence of the Court of Como, were delivered by a clerk to an incinerator in the capital, which, at the same time, carried out their destruction. Some of the evidence, in the possession of the defense, was kept at the University of Pavia. In various sentences of 2018, the Court of Cassation repeatedly rejected the request to proceed with the examination of the evidence that had never been analysed, not seeing any utility or purpose in this regard: one of the new evidences consisted, for example, of a Motorola cell phone whose ownership was already known, namely that of the victim Raffaella Castagna. In April 2023, Milan's deputy attorney general Cuno Tarfusser presented a new request for a review of the trial, arguing that the testimony of witness Mario Frigerio was not reliable, that the DNA trace found on Olindo Romano's door sill could be due to contamination that occurred during the investigations, and that the Romano spouses' confessions contained too many errors to be credible. In July, Attorney General Francesca Nanni announced that she had decided not to pursue the request and initiated disciplinary proceedings against Tarfusser because, according to the organizational document of the office, only the Attorney General and the Attorney General were entitled to request a review. In January 2024, the request for review was admitted to discussion before the with hearings starting in March 2024. On 10 July 2024, the Court of Appeal of Brescia definitively decided not to proceed with a new trial, rejecting the request for review because the elements brought by the defense did not constitute new evidence. On 10 March 2025, the Court of Cassation confirmed the CSM's censure of Tarfusser who requested a review of the trial, accused of having acted autonomously, failing to fulfil the "duties of impartiality and correctness" by having filed the request on his own initiative, "in clear violation of the organizational document of the office" which assigns this power only to the Attorney General at the Court of Appeal or his deputy and "having acted as if he were the couple's lawyer and asking for the review alone to gain media visibility. On 25 March 2025, the Court of Cassation closed the case by rejecting the appeal of the defence lawyers who asked for the reopening of the case, with a sentence previously declared "inadmissible" on appeal and de facto sanctioning the end of the controversy related to the guilt of the spouses. == Victims ==

• Paola Galli (57 years old), mother of Raffaella Castagna and mother-in-law of Azouz Marzouk. • Raffaella Castagna (30 years old), wife of Azouz Marzouk. • Youssef Marzouk (2 years old), son of Raffaella Castagna and Azouz Marzouk. • Valeria Cherubini (55 years old), neighbour and wife of Mario Frigerio. == Cultural impact ==

Podcast • Investigations: Erba, December 11, 2006 (2022), podcast in two episodes edited by . • DPEN Crimes: The Erba Massacre (2021), a fourteen-episode podcast curated by Luca Pallavidino. • Urban Demons: The Republic of Rosa and Olindo (2020), podcast by Gli Ascoltabili edited by Gianluca Chinnici and Giuseppe Paternò Raddusa. Influences in mass culture Olindo and Rosa are mentioned in the following passages: • In Cage by M¥SS KETA • '''' by Immanuel Casto. • Story of a cursed by Bonnot ft. Caparezza, and Paolo Fresu • Up the Hands by Fabri Fibra • Lewandowski II by Ernia • ''L'Erba di Grace'' by Salmo • by • ''La Profezia dell'armadillo'' by Zerocalcare, and in "Pattini" • GTA VI by , MadMan and Mattak == Notes ==