Woman punished for collaborating with Sicilian police

A woman was on Sunday night being cared for by social services in Sicily after losing her home and her job for collaborating with police against an alleged rapist.

The woman, who has not been named, was sacked by her employer and evicted by her brother, despite the fact that her assistance enabled criminal charges to be brought against an alleged murderer.

The affair is a reminder of the persistence in parts of southern Italy of age-old concepts of honor and a prejudice against helping the authorities that, among other things, allowed the Mafia's "boss of bosses," the recently arrested Bernardo Provenzano, to remain at large for more than four decades.

At the end of last month, the 38-year-old woman was asleep in the house she shared with her brother when she was attacked by an intruder who had climbed in from a balcony.

She fled to a bathroom, but her attacker kicked in the door. By then, however, he and his intended victim had made so much noise that neighbors appeared in the street and on terraces to see what was going on.

After punching the woman hard in the face, the man fled.

When the police got to the house, they found her slumped in a corner clutching a clump of her attacker's hair. She gave investigators a detailed account of what happened, and the hair provided them with vital forensic evidence.

It was not long before they visited Emilio Zanini, 42, a local man with a criminal record for attempted rape.

As they searched his home, they found newspaper reports of a deadly attack last year on a university student.

Roberta Riina, 22, was found with a crushed skull. After matching a sample of Zanini's DNA with one found at the scene of the killing, he was charged with the student's rape and murder.

Back Partinico, a stronghold of the Mafia, the woman victim had been dismissed from her part-time job as a cleaner in a bar.

Police Italian media it was not clear whether her employer was concerned about reprisals or simply enforcing omerta, the tradition of non-cooperation with the police that not only binds mafiosi but is also respected by many other Sicilians.

Last Wednesday, the woman's plight took a further turn for the worse when she was thrown out of the house that she and her brother had inherited from their parents. The council has since arranged for her to be taken into a hostel.

Mimma Tortorici, the head of local social services, told the daily newspaper Corriere della Sera: "This is typical of the attitude of a brother who decides to take `playing the Sicilian' to its ultimate conclusion so as to remove the shame [of an attempted rape]."