On November 19, 2001, a convoy of cars carrying journalists traveling on the road from Jalalabad to Kabul was joined by armed men.
Maria Grazia Cutuli, 39, a correspondent for Corriere della Sera, was killed in the ambush.
El Mundo correspondent Julio Fuentes and two Reuters correspondents, the Australian Harry Burton and the Afghan Azizullah Haidari, also lost their lives.
A death raid, explained a few years later an investigator from the Rome Public Prosecutor's Office who immediately launched an investigation into the murder, which took place at a time when in Afghanistan "Taliban groups, barricaded on those mountains, attacked and violently robbed everyone (and only ) Western journalists who passed through the road that was the only one that led to Pakistan through the administrative district of Sarobi ".
These were "guerrilla actions, deliberately directed and addressed only to foreign journalists" which "aimed at exploiting the media to convince Western public opinion that Afghanistan was absolutely ungovernable by those occupation forces whose governments instead, they declared the opposite ".
Over the years the investigations have tried, with difficulty, to arrive at a truth to identify the perpetrators of the ambush.
Two proceedings were carried out in piazzale Clodio: the first ended with the acquittal of Jan Mar because it was not possible to arrive at the certainty of his identification. Earlier, Fedai Mohammed Taher and Jan Miwa were acquitted due to insufficient evidence. One last defendant, Reaza Khan, was arrested and tried in 2007 in Kabul and was subsequently executed in his homeland.
On November 29, 2017, the Assize Court of the capital sentenced two Afghan citizens believed to belong to the killer commando: Mamur and Zar Jan, both of Pashtun ethnicity.
Twenty-four years of imprisonment was the sentence imposed on the two defendants at the time detained in their homeland where, for the ambush they were serving respectively 16 and 18 years of imprisonment.
The assize court also imposed on the two accused, who heard the verdict via videoconference, compensation for damages to the journalist's family and to the RCS for a total of 250 thousand euros.
The Prosecutor had requested a 30-year sentence against them as well as for the crime of voluntary homicide also for robbery.
The latter case referred to the theft, in competition with other unidentified people, of a radio, a computer and a camera belonging to Cutuli.
For the two defendants, one year later, the sentence was also confirmed on appeal.