Italy murders prompt castration call

ROME, Italy -- The granddaughter of former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini has called for chemical castration of sex offenders following the brutal murders of two young girls.

Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, suggested chemical castration or lifetime confinement in medical institutions for sex offenders as an alternative to prison.

Mussolini, a legislator from the right-wing National Alliance, said: "Prison alone doesn't help."

Speaking to the ANSA news agency, she also said that lists should be published naming those "tending toward pedophilia."

But Rev Gianni Baget Bozo, a priest with close ties to the conservative Forza Italia political alliance, dismissed Mussolini's "Nazi" ideas and said they were a product of the "immense August heat, an end-of-summer nightmare."

Mussolini, who has received support from by Maretta Scoca, of the centrist UDEUR party, spoke out following the separate murders at the weekend of eight-year-old Graziella Mansi and five-year-old Hagere Kilani.

Both crimes have shocked Italy, where thousands of people in the southern Puglia region attended Monday's funeral of Mansi.

An 18-year-old, Pasquale Tortora, has confessed to her murder.

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

Mansi was murdered on Saturday, the day after the murder of Kilani, a Tunisian immigrant, in Imperia on the Italian Riviera.

Police, who found her body in an apartment near her home, say the prime suspect, a Romanian immigrant, escaped across the border to France.

In the wake of the killings, a group which campaigns against child abuse has offered to make public a list, compiled from court hearings, of 140 convicted paedophiles living in Tuscany and Umbria.

A similar move in the UK, in which a national newspaper began naming paedophiles following the abduction and murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne, resulted in outbreaks of violence against known sex offenders and street protests by concerned parents.

Italy's social affairs minister, Livia Turco, rejecting Mussolini's call for chemical castration as "useless and harmful," added: "The experience in England should tell us a lot of things."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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