«The set of elements exposed constitutes a relevant and technically well-founded framework, suitable for justifying the reopening of the case». This is the motivation that appears in the dossier request that Sonia Marra’s family has entrusted to their lawyer, the lawyer Alessandro Vesi, to be filed with the Prosecutor’s Office in Perugia, aimed at restarting the investigations into the case of the 25-year-old student from Specchia (Lecce), who disappeared on 16 November 2006, from the Umbrian capital where she was studying to become a biomedical laboratory technician.
A case closed by a definitive acquittal
Killed, but it is not yet known by whom, as the Court of Cassation established in the trial that led to the definitive acquittal of Umberto Bindella, the only defendant, the boy the victim was dating, who has always denied any responsibility and was acquitted at first instance, on appeal and finally in the Court of Cassation. Just as it is still a mystery where his body is, never found.
The family focuses on DNA
In the request for the reopening of the case, the family focuses on the new scientific techniques available today. «20 years have passed and we still don’t know anything about Sonia», says her brother Piero Marra. Article 414 of the Criminal Procedure Code, he continues, says that the procedure «can be reopened if new elements emerge that modify the evidentiary framework. In this case, as confirmed by the jurisprudence of legitimacy, the new element can be represented by the availability of new technologies for the detection of DNA that can be applied and which were not available in 2006, when Sonia disappeared”.
«The Prosecutor’s Office has the duty to reopen»
New technologies, Marra declares, could “lead to identifying the man who was seen entering my sister’s house on the evening of his disappearance”. «The Prosecutor’s Office of Perugia – he concludes – has the duty to reopen the case».