Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Terzi on Tuesday summoned India’s ambassador to Rome to condemn the imprisonment of two Italian marines accused of shooting dead two Indian fishermen as illegitimate. Terzi told ambassador Shri Debabrata Saha that the incarceration of the two soldiers in a prison in Thiruvananthapuram in the southern state of Kerala ordered by a judge on Monday was “unacceptable”, a ministry spokesman said. Even the preferential treatment afforded to the two men, Massimiliano Latorre and Salvatore Girone, who are currently being housed in a separate structure within the prison was “not satisfactory”, Terzi told the diplomat. The two were deployed as security guards on an Italian oil tanker and they were arrested in Kerala last month after allegedly killing the two fishermen who were on a boat that was apparently mistaken for a pirate vessel. Terzi reportedly told the ambassador that Italy “does not recognise the legitimacy” of the legal case in India “due to the absence of jurisdiction.”
