MILAN (AP) — A 22-year-old Italian man who confessed in court docket to killing his ex-girlfriend was convicted of her homicide on Tuesday and sentenced to life in jail in a case that fueled nationwide outrage over violence towards girls.
Filippo Turetta stored his eyes down as the decision and sentence had been learn in a Venice court docket somewhat over a yr after the physique of 22-year-old Giulia Cecchettin was present in a ditch within the northern Veneto area. She had been stabbed greater than 70 occasions, and her physique was wrapped in plastic luggage.
Cecchettin went lacking final November after going to the mall along with her ex-boyfriend. Her disappearance gripped Italy as authorities looked for them. She was discovered every week later.
Turetta was later arrested in Germany.
In saying the decision, the choose excluded aggravating circumstances of cruelty and stalking however nonetheless handed down Italy’s hardest sentence.
The killing fueled calls for for motion to cease violence towards girls. In the primary 10 months of this yr, 96 girls in Italy had been killed, 51 of them by present or former romantic companions, in accordance with Interior Ministry statistics.
Some 10,000 mourners attended Cecchettin’s funeral a yr in the past, ringing bells and shaking keys as a part of a marketing campaign to “make noise” towards gender violence. Her father, Gino Cecchettin, urged mourners to be “brokers of change” in a tradition that always “undervalues the lives of girls.”
“No one will give me again Giulia,’’ Cecchettin’s father mentioned after the decision.
He added: “I don’t assume you fight gender violence with sentences. You fight with prevention. Therefore, as a human being I really feel defeated. As a father, nothing has modified from yesterday, from a yr in the past.”
