MATTEOTI MURDER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 June 1941, Page 5

MATTEOTI MURDER

ASSASSIN ACCUSES DUCE HEAVY BTHBE RECEIVED. LETTER TO MARSHAL DE BONO. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON. June 10. The Cairo correspondent of the Associated Press of Great Britain says that a photostat copy of a letter from Amerigo Dumini to Marshal de Bono, in which Dumini confesses to the murder of the Italian Socialist leader Matteoti and declares that he received 190,000 lire from Mussolini, "to put me straight," is published in the antiFascist’ paper "Correro d’ltalia.” Dumini. it is stated, lived at Dorna, Libya, and the letter, dated October 28, 1923, was found when the British captured the (own last January. Dumini told the Associated Press that he waited for the entry of the British because he preferred capture to living under Fascist rule. He said he was exiled to Libya in 1934 for anti-Fascist activities, and his letter tells a terrible tale of persecution by the Italian police.

The member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Giacomo Matteoti. who was secretary of the Unitaro group in the Socialist movement, was murdered in 1924, two years after Mussolini’s "March on Rome.” The Encyclopaedia Britannica states that Matteoti mysteriously disappeared, and a day or two later it was discovered that he had been kidnapped in a motor-car by Dumini, Volpi and other Fascists of shady antecedents and carried off to an unknown destination. The affair created a sensation and the Opposition deputies and Press seized on it to indulg’S in the gravest accusations against all leading Fascists. The trial of five men was ended in 1926. The sentence on Dumini, Volpi and Poveromo was five years 11 months and 20 days' penal servitude, of which four years were remitted later under an amnesty and one year and nine months were already served in awaiting trial. They had therefore to serve only two months and 20 days imprisonment.