Head of a goat placed on a journalist’s car

In Catania Fabiola Foti (L’Urlo) reported the presence of previous offenders among the bearers of the statue of the patron Saint Agata.

In the night between the 8th and the 9th February 2019, in Acicatena (Catania) someone left two goat heads, bloody and skinned, on the windscreen of the car of the journalist Fabiola Foti, chief editor and co-editor of the online newspaper L’Urlo . The car was parked near her home.

As soon as she discovered them, Fabiola Foti called the police and made a formal complaint to the main police station of Acicatena. The journalist is unable to say who could have carried out the gesture which has an obvious intimidating meaning.

She received expressions of solidarity from the Order of journalists, from Assostampa and from Unci Sicilia. Closeness to Foti was also expressed by the mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, and by the president of the Sicilian Antimafia Commission, Claudio Fava.

A few days before, on February 6th, the reporter had published, exclusively, on her website some photos showing a previously convicted individual from Catania beneath the statue of Sant’Agata carried in procession. In those days the annual festivities for the patron saint were held in Catania. For those images she had received on the publication’s Facebook page criticism and insults such as “Mind your own business”. In the text that accompanies the images, the reporter underlined that the presence of the suspect infringed the regulation of the festivities. In fact, it requires that the bearers of the statue have no convictions against them and to this end they must sign a declaration regarding their criminal record to “exclude connections with crimes, among others, of the Mafia”. The original bearer the journalist recalls, had been replaced precisely because a photo had revealed the presence of a suspect, among the bearers of the statue of Sant’Agata.

“You don’t expect something like this to happen – the reporter told Ossigeno – I continue to write and I’ve resumed publishing articles on the subject. The fear is there but I feel supported and strong from the great solidarity received”.

Foti has been writing about the organization of the feast of Sant’Agata since October 2018, highlighting all the criticisms related to organizational problems and the internal dynamics over the division of tasks. From October up to today she has published 16 articles on the subject. Also this year the conduct of the procession had been the subject of controversy. Foti, like other reporters wrote of the change of route of the procession, requested by the “capovara” for security reasons, and which is now the subject of an investigation by the Catania Public Prosecutor for an alleged round of clandestine betting on the times of the position along the route of the statue.

RDM