Italian paedophile murders spark outrage

The sex-slayings of two little girls over the weekend in Italy prompted calls Monday for chemical castration of sex offenders and publishing the names of paedophiles.

The sex-slayings of two little girls over the weekend in Italy prompted calls Monday for chemical castration of sex offenders and publishing the names of paedophiles.

"Prison alone doesn't help," Alessandra Mussolini, a legislator from the right-wing National Alliance, was quoted as saying by the ANSA news agency.

Mussolini, the granddaughter of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, suggested chemical castration or lifetime confinement in medical institutions as alternatives to prison.

She also said that lists that are published should include names of those "tending toward pedophilia."

Another legislator, Maretta Scoca, of the centrist UDEUR party, also called for chemical castration. The two murders deeply shocked the nation.

Thousands of people in the southern Puglia region attended the funeral Monday of 8-year-old Graziella Mansi, who was sexually assaulted, then burned alive.

An 18-year-old, Pasquale Tortora, has confessed.

"The moral revulsion against pedophilia is rising, a positive sign," Bishop Raffaele Calabro said as he presided over her funeral.

Mansi was slain on Saturday, just a day after the murder of a 5-year-old Tunisian immigrant in Imperia on the Italian Riviera. Hagere Kilani was abducted, raped and repeatedly stabbed.

Police, who found her body in an apartment a few meters (yards) away from her house, say the suspect, a clandestine Romanian immigrant, fled across the border to France. Amid the outrage, a group against child abuse offered to make available a list of 140 convicted paedophiles in Tuscany and Umbria that was compiled from public court rulings.

Italy's social affairs minister, Livia Turco, rejected the idea as "useless and harmful" and said "the experience in England should tell us a lot of things."

Two men in Britain committed suicide earlier this month after a tabloid newspaper published names, photos and locations of alleged paedophiles.

The newspaper dropped its campaign after a series of attacks on suspected sex offenders and people mistaken for them.

"When fundamental rights are at stake...we must stick to law and legality," Turco told the Milan daily Corriere della Sera.

A priest with close ties to the conservative Forza Italia political alliance, the Rev. Gianni Baget Bozo, meanwhile, attacked Mussolini's suggestion of chemical castration as a "Nazi" idea and a likely product of the "immense August heat, an end-of-summer nightmare," ANSA said.