State funeral for Italian hero

2005-03-07 17:45

Maria Sanminiatelli

Rome - Hundreds of mourners packed a Rome church on Monday to pay their last respects to an Italian intelligence officer shot and killed by American troops in Iraq while escorting an ex-hostage to freedom.

Nicola Calipari's state funeral in the Santa Maria degli Angeli Church drew Premier Silvio Berlusconi, President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and other top officials, including US Ambassador Mel Sembler and Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni.

An honour guard slowly carried the casket, draped with an Italian flag, into the church, where people stood to applaud. In the front row, Calipari's relatives gripped each other's hands and dabbed away tears. Several mourners buried their faces in their hands.

"He died as a hero, and I cannot forget he had also helped to free us," Maurizio Agliana, one of four Italian security guards kidnapped in Iraq last April, told the crowd.

The 90-minute funeral was carried live on several TV stations, including Vatican television, which usually only broadcasts Vatican ceremonies.

Calipari's body had lain in state at Rome's Vittoriano monument after it was returned from Iraq on Saturday night, with tens of thousands of people streaming past the flag-draped coffin.

Died shielding her

"I think it's absurd that things are going this way in Iraq, when people die because of someone else's decision," said 30-year-old architect Giorgia Semprini, who was among thousands of people who gathered quietly in the piazza outside the church.

Giuliana Sgrena, the hostage whose life Calipari saved, said it was possible they were targeted deliberately because the United States opposes Italy's policy of negotiating with kidnappers, and promised Calipari's widow to find out why they were attacked.

Calipari was killed when US troops at a checkpoint fired at their vehicle on Friday as they headed to the airport shortly after her release. Sgrena, a journalist who was abducted on February 4 in Baghdad, was recovering in a Rome hospital from a shrapnel wound to the shoulder and was not expected to attend the funeral.

Calipari was to be awarded a gold medal of valour for heroism.

An autopsy was performed on Sunday, and the Italian news agency ANSA quoted doctors as saying he was struck in the temple by a single round and died instantly.

Sgrena said Calipari died shielding her. She offered no evidence to support her claim that the attack was deliberate, and in an interview published in Monday's edition of the daily Corriere della Sera, she said she doesn't know what led to the attack.

- SAPA