(Rome) A deputy from Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Fratelli d’Italia party found himself at the center of a controversy on Tuesday for bringing a gun to a New Year’s Eve party that injured a guest , a case which gave rise to the opening of an investigation by the prosecution.
Emanuele Pozzolo, 38, admitted to having come with this weapon, a 22 caliber mini-pistol, to a party organized in the premises of a cultural association in Rosazza, a hamlet of around a hundred inhabitants 70 km from Turin (northwest).
“I confirm that the shot was fired accidentally from a legal pistol belonging to me, but it was not me who fired,” he said in a statement cited by the left-wing daily La Repubblica.
The 31-year-old victim, slightly injured in the leg, was one of around thirty guests.
The unfolding of this incident, which occurred after midnight, is unclear. Initially, Emanuele Pozzolo allegedly told the investigators who arrived on site that he had “taken out the weapon to show it when a shot went off”, according to La Repubblica.
Prosecutors said in a statement that they were examining the possible commission of crimes such as intentional or unintentional injury and had seized the pistol. They also seized the bullet which lodged in the left thigh of the guest.
The guest would be the son-in-law of a bodyguard of Minister Delegate for Justice Andrea Delmastro, who according to the press also participated in the evening.
Even though the victim was hospitalized for less than a day, the opposition parties did not fail to stigmatize the irresponsible behavior of the deputy, whose party proposed in December to lower the minimum age to 16 years to obtain the permit to carry hunting weapons.
In Italy, the possession of weapons is strictly regulated by a weapons permit. Hunting and sport shooting permits limit its carrying to the shooting range and hunting grounds, and only the permit issued for personal defense allows it to be carried anywhere on one’s person.
“We could not imagine that the passion for the weapons of Giorgia Meloni’s party was such that the deputies brought them loaded to the New Year’s parties,” denounced the leader of the Democratic Party (PD, left) Elly Schlein, calling the first minister to take “measures against Pozzolo”.
Same indignation among the former centrist prime minister Matteo Renzi: “Why bring weapons to a New Year’s party in the presence of deputies and members of the government? Meloni’s ruling class is not one: they are unsuitable, incapable, unpresentable. And dangerous,” he wrote on X.
Emanuele Pozzolo, opposed to vaccines and health passports during the COVID-19 pandemic, has also been accused in the past of making sexist and discriminatory remarks.
Neither Giorgia Meloni nor Fratelli d’Italia have reacted officially at this stage.