hitman mode

Tomasso Debenedetti, during the interview with EL PAÍS, in 2010, in Rome.

One man has the serious media calling public figures to ask if they are dead and people of good faith getting upset and sending heartfelt and unnecessary condolences.

His name is Tommasso Debenedetti (or so he says) and in 2010, in an interview with EL PAÍS, he boasted of being "the Italian champion of lies."

In recent days he has killed (on Twitter) former Vice President Elena Salgado.

Before, he included among his victims the writer Gabriel García Márquez, the author of the Harry Potter saga, JK Rowling, the Pope... His tactic —quite effective— consists of creating a false account with the name and photograph of someone known —so that it seems that the source is reliable— and from there, launch the hoax.

In the case of Salgado, he chose José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, the new government delegate in Galicia.

Posing as him, he tweeted: “Very sad news.

Elena Salgado, ex-minister and great Galician, has died.

Flesh and blood politicians fell into the trap and wrote tweets lamenting the (non) death.

Some media also came to publish the (non) news.

Shortly after, another tweet confessed: "Fake account created by Tommasso Debenedetti."

The Italian did not start by killing.

At first, he was content to interview (in his imagination) famous people: from the Dalai Lama to Noam Chomsky;

from Mikhail Gorbachev to Joseph Ratzinger.

"My idea was to be a serious and honest cultural journalist, but in Italy it is impossible," he justified himself in this newspaper.

“The information in this country is based on falsification.

Everything strains as long as it is favorable to the editorial line.

I simply lent myself to that game to be able to publish and I played it until the end to denounce this state of affairs.

The game has turned macabre.

Now he uses Twitter in hitman mode.

As a

, Debenedetti offered fake interviews with the most appealing characters to small newspapers, to see if they would bite.

And they stung.

multiple times.

But not only small fish.

In 2015, he slipped one to

which, believing what a false Mario Vargas Llosa account said, included, in a literary review, that the writer had announced his wedding to Isabel Preysler.

The Italian had misspelled the surname of the queen of hearts, but the author of the article was not suspicious and the newspaper had to publish the rectification sent by the Nobel Prize: "I have never had a Twitter account, I have never published nor will I publish anything on that social network.

Shocked to learn that such gossip can find its way into a reputable publication."

Drunk with power, Debenedetti impersonated another Nobel laureate, the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Aleksiévich, and the president of Afghanistan.

It was another writer, Philip Roth, who exposed the

who apparently had the best contact book in the world.

A journalist from

asked him about statements he had read in another Italian newspaper,

, in which Roth was disappointed with Barack Obama.

The stunned novelist said that he had never spoken to

and who also thought just the opposite: "Obama is fantastic."

It had been another Debenedetti fantasy.

Roth, annoyed, began to investigate who was the author of the fake interview and discovered that John Grisham had been the victim of the same ploy, with similar criticisms of Obama, the bait to attract publishers.

Broken the toy of the interviews, the Italian went to the one of the

.

His performance shows that lying, like any virus, is contagious, so it is convenient to enter Twitter with all precautions and vaccinations.

He also reveals that some do not know to be right, that is, when to stop.