On February 15 the Italian Embassy in Kinshasa informed with the verbal note Prot. N.
219 the Congo Foreign Ministry of the forthcoming trip to the Goma region of the Italian ambassador
Luca Attanasio
, and that the trip would take place from 19 to 24 February.
The authenticity of the document, which has been circulating on social media since yesterday, has been confirmed to ANSA by qualified sources.
After the killing of Attanasio and Iacovacci, the Congolese Ministry of the Interior had said that neither the security services nor the local authorities had been able to guarantee the safety of the convoy, due to lack of information on their presence.
In the verbal note, received and stamped by the Congolese Foreign Ministry on February 15, the Congo authorities are asked to authorize the access of Ambassador Luca Attanasio, consul Alfredo Bruno Russo and carabiniere Vittorio Iacovacci to Ndjili international airport , the main airport of Kinshasa, from which the journey would have started and where the three Italians were supposed to return on 24 February.
The reason for the trip indicated in the document is a visit to the Italian community of Goma and Bukavu, a city about 200 kilometers south of Goma.
The Congolese foreign ministry, through its national direction of the protocol of state, confirms that it received on February 15 the note with which the Italian embassy informed them of the trip to Goma of the ambassador Luca Attanasio.
But - according to a document headed and stamped by the same ministry with today's date, made public by an RFI journalist - on the same day Attanasio "visited the director of the State Protocol to inform him that the trip would no longer take place and that a second note would have been communicated in this regard ".
The management, the document continues, was therefore "amazed to learn from social media that the ambassador had been murdered, while waiting for the note that had to cancel the first".
The Foreign Ministry document also highlights how the attack took place along the road from Goma to Rutshuru in the north, an itinerary not mentioned in the embassy's note verbale, which does not go into details of the five-day trip but mentions only the destinations of Goma and Bukavu.
Also according to the document of the ministry of Kinshasa, the antenna of the Congolese state protocol would never have seen Attanasio boarding at Ndjili airport.