THE ASSASSINATION OF MATTEOTTI

Will we find the body of the unfortunate deputy?
(From our special correspondent)

Rome, June 28.
From Césare Rossi to Dumini and Viola, all those accused of the assassination of deputy Matteotti are now behind bars. Italy breathes. She awaits the meeting of the various left-wing parties, of which the hundred members, the twenty communists being excluded, will meet for the first time in order to decide on the course of action to be taken after Mr. Mussolini's speech at the Palace of Venice, that of Mr. Albertini, director of Corriere della Sera, in Milan, and especially the appointment of Mr. Federzeni to the Ministry of the Interior. Mussolini demands the return of the opposition to the Chamber. She will decide.

Rome is calm. The fascist troops are moving away. But the bloody Matteotti news story continues to hold a large place in conversations and what emerges from the investigation is not enough to fuel public curiosity.

We would like the body of the secretary of the united party to be found by the police or thanks to the confessions of the murderers. The assassins had him burned in the crematorium, some claimed.

I went to the end of Via Tiburtina, in Campo Santo, to see if it was possible. I entered the funeral atrium. Under the blazing sun, I followed the rows of tombs decorated with portraits of the deceased, their busts, their photographs or scenes sculpted in white marble. I reached, behind these monuments of sumptuous piety, the crowd of humble tumuli only decorated with glittering enamel hearts on the cross and adorned with flower pots sunk in the grass. Lost, I asked directions from gravediggers laughing loudly and more joyful than the birds of the air.

He made the crematore? They pointed out to me the enormous brick citadel hollowed out by the columbarium and where the tombs are nothing more than a crypt, a facade or a marble slab in front of which small lamps burn. I questioned the colossal guard, who snatched his tip from me as if he wanted to take my life with it, and I understood that it would also have been impossible for the bandits to find there the numerous subordinate complicities necessary to make a corpse damaged by blows disappear only if, as has been said, they had wanted to entrust it to the amphitheater of a hospital. Because Cesare Rossi himself, the main accused, although a friend of Mussolini, did not have, as head of the press office, the omnipotence that would have been necessary to force all the doors and close all the mouths. .

If we do not forget, in fact, in France that "Madame Sans-Gêne", the wife of Marshal Lefebvre, was first a laundress, we also know in Rome, under Mussolini, that Rossi was not first as a typographer and Filipelli, director of the Corriere Italiano that he had become, a poor little Milanese advertising agent before the prodigious fortune of the Duce and that they were only approaching power without holding it. The government itself, I think, could not have ensured that such an extraordinary thing was walled up forever behind such unanimous silence.
But then, what did Dumini, Mazzoli, Putato and Volpi do with the corpse of their victim?

Putato did not lead his accomplices to Vico unnecessarily, I am told, he who knew the area. He knew that a place in the lake was fifty meters deep, just in front of the clearing where the bloody car stopped, and that the body. weighted, carried in a boat, cannot get back out.

If the assassins did not get rid of the corpse in this way, which they could not bring back to Rome because of the granting of the bridge of Milvio, they could have buried it in quicklime taken from a nearby kiln. Or they could have burned it on the spot with gasoline brought by a second car, seen in Ronciglione shortly after the first and which was carrying two or three travelers. Justice must shed light on this point. But his research in the thickets of Vico has so far remained fruitless and we hear formulating all the hypotheses that the French public enjoyed, under Clemenceau, during the Landru affair, without any clarity emerging from them. Another question the opposition will ask is this:

At what time was the government informed of the crime?

The thing is of great importance. Mussolini repeated in the Senate what he had said in the House: he was warned on Wednesday, the day after the attack. But it is claimed that General di Bono, leader of the fascist volunteers and director of Security, would have been warned beforehand.

Emmanuel Bourcier