The Prosecutor’s Office closes the investigation into Andrea Sempio: according to the prosecutors, he is the man who killed Chiara Poggi. What happens now
Today, for the Pavia Prosecutor’s Office, Andrea Sempio is no longer just a name that has come back to the surface in the Garlasco case. He is the man who, according to the magistrates’ accusation, killed Chiara Poggi on 13 August 2007 in the villa in Via Pascoli. The closure of the investigations, notified to the suspect with the notice required by article 415 bis of the code of criminal procedure, marks a very serious step in one of the most controversial judicial events in Italian news.
Sempio, who denies the accusations, was 19 years old at the time of the crime and was one of the closest friends of Marco Poggi, the victim’s brother. This is the bond that brings him into the story: not a stranger, but a known presence in the Poggi family environment, a figure who had access to that world and who for years remained on the margins of the great trial story built around Alberto Stasi, definitively convicted of the murder.
The new accusation from the Pavia Prosecutor’s Office
According to prosecutors, Andrea Sempio was the perpetrator of the crime. The accusatory reconstruction hypothesizes that the murder occurred after the rejection of an advance by Chiara Poggi. After that refusal, Sempio probably hit her with a hammer at least twelve times. The aggravating circumstances contested are cruelty and abject motives.
It is a very harsh reconstruction, but it remains a hypothesis of the Prosecutor’s Office: Sempio is a suspect, not a convicted person. The notification of 415 bis indicates that the investigation has been closed and that the defense can now file briefs, request new documents or interrogations before any request for indictment.
Who was Andrea Sempio in 2007
In 2007 Andrea Sempio was a 19 year old boy. She frequented Marco Poggi, Chiara’s brother, and was considered one of her closest friends. His name had already appeared in the documents and in the subsequent steps of the case, but for years he had not been the center of the judicial affair.
The Garlasco case, in fact, had another public face: that of Alberto Stasi, Chiara Poggi’s boyfriend at the time, definitively sentenced to 16 years in prison. The new investigation into Sempio, however, reopens the scenario and introduces an alternative reconstruction of the murder, so much so as to push the transmission of the documents to Milan to evaluate the possible revision of the Stasi trial.
The role of Marco Poggi according to the investigators
Marco Poggi also enters the new reconstruction. According to the investigators, Chiara’s brother would have changed his testimonies and would have appeared “hostile and in constant defense of Sempio”. It is a very delicate passage, because it concerns not a suspect for the murder, but the victim’s brother and his relationship with the friend now accused by prosecutors.
In the days preceding the closure of the investigations, Marco Poggi was heard as a witness by the Pavia Prosecutor’s Office. According to what was reported in the news, he reiterated that he did not believe in Sempio’s guilt.
Because the case returns to shake Italy
The closure of the investigations against Andrea Sempio is not a sentence, but is the most advanced point of a new investigative hypothesis that overturns the center of gravity of the Garlasco case. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, the perpetrator of the murder would be the friend of Chiara’s brother. For definitive justice, however, the condemned remains Alberto Stasi.
It is in this fracture that the case becomes explosive again: on the one hand a judicial truth already written, on the other a new accusation that indicates another man as responsible for the crime. In the middle, the memory of Chiara Poggi, killed at the age of 26, and a question that has continued to find no peace for almost twenty years: what really happened that morning in the house in Garlasco?
