Case against ex-Italian PM Conte over mismanagement of pandemic, dropped

A court in Italy has dropped a case against former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and former Health Minister Roberto Speranza into the alleged mismanagement of the country's first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic in the northern city of Bergamo.

The Court of Ministers in Brescia on Wednesday dismissed the positions of Conte and Speranza in the Bergamo Public Prosecutor's probe, reports Italy's state-run ANSA news agency.

According to judicial sources, the probe was looking into the management of the first phase of the pandemic in Bergamo's Val Seriana, where the two former Minisers were accused of not extending a lockdown to two outlying areas and thereby causing unwarranted deaths.

In their defence, Conte and Speranza have always maintained of acting in accordance with the available scientific data and the opinions of experts.

Bergamo located in Lombardy region was Italy's (and Europe's) first large pandemic hotspot between February and March 2020, reports Xinhua news agency.

The city of around 120,000 inhabitants accounted for at least 670 victims, and the province, also known as Bergamo with a population of 1.1 million, tallied some 6,000 fatalities.

On March 18, 2020, long columns of army vehicles plied across the streets of Bergamo carrying hundreds of coffins to various cemeteries.

Lombardy was where the virus first started spreading in Europe and more than half the victims in Italy died in the region.

In April 2020, Conte had denied claims that he underestimated the crisis.

He said that if he had ordered a lockdown at the beginning, when the first virus clusters were detected, "people would have taken me for a madman".

The then Prime Minister had also dismissed a suggestion that Italy could have rapidly imposed a big lockdown.

--IANS

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