On Friday 12th, two witnesses reported on Andy Rocchelli’s and Andrey Mironov’s murder:
- Fabrizio Romano: former italian ambassador in Kiev where he resided until fall 2016; he took full charge of the retrieval of Andy’s and Andrey’s corpses and arranged the transport operations from Slavianks to Kiev. His statements have been rather generic concerning the transfer ( that implied a truce-like security channel to be set so that Ukrainian military corps wouldn’t shoot at the Russian driver who volunteered to take the coffins out of Donbass ). Mr Romano confirmed that the case was extensively covered by both Ukrainian and Russian media thus undermining the version reported by the two Ukrainian senators who came as spontaneous witnesses in court (Mr Bogdan Matkivskyi and Mr Andrii Antonyschak meant they learnt about this case once Vitaly Markiv was arrested); Mr Romano recalled his repeated efforts to bring up the case with the Ukrainian authorities during his mandate in Kiev.
- Luca Soldati: lawyer and ballistics consultant for the defense. He based his studies upon the Ukrainian rogatory -though vague and incomplete- and upon the autopsy report to infer that splinters rather than direct mortar fire has been the cause of Andy’s death. He deems difficult to link those splinters to mortar bombs. When questioned about Mironov, beheaded, Mr Soldati admitted that must have been mortar fire.
He supposes a cross-fire situation given the different angles of the holes unevenly scattered on the taxi; he admitted he never took in consideration the dynamic of the event: the cab was forced to make a quick U turn to escape from the unceasing shootings coming from Karachun hill.
He has been proved wrong regarding the dimensions of the mortal wounds detected on Andy’s body: mr Soldati was minimizing their size.
He mentioned the fireworks related substances were spotted on Andy’s backpack during the analyses, although it’s seems highly unlikely that fireworks were much in use in Donbass at the time.