ROME
The Guardian
May 23, 2019
By Angela Giuffrida
Book says officials manipulated children into making abuse claims, leading to convictions, family separations and deaths
In the early hours of 7 July 1997, Federico Scotta and his wife were woken by an incessant ringing of their doorbell. Police had arrived at their home in Mirandola, a town in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, with a search warrant.
Officers found nothing incriminating, but the couple and their three-year-old daughter and baby son were escorted to the police station. The children were taken away by social workers that day and a few months later a third child was taken from the delivery room. The couple never saw the children again.
The so-called “Satanic panic” phenomenon that had swept through the US and parts of the UK earlier that decade had reached Italy. Scotta and his wife were accused of belonging to a sprawling paedophile network that worshipped the devil and sacrificed children and animals in cemeteries at night.
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