October 16, 2000, outskirts of Tbilisi. A retired policeman finds a dead body with a crushed chest into a country lane.
He’s Antonio Russo, the correspondent of Radio Radicale who disappeared two nights before from his home. Accident? Robbery? Or murder? He was documenting the war in Chechnya and denounced the Russian use of prohibited weapons on civilians. All the documentary material he had collected was stolen and never found, but perhaps things are different.
The podcast details the judicial investigations opened (one in Georgia, the other in Italy) to shed light on the murder, revealing its limits, inconsistencies and misdirection. Unlikely suspects are elected, unreliable reconstructions formulated, the only suspect is a Dutch artist. Is he really involved? Twenty-one years after the death, the truth remains buried, and all questions are unanswered. “The Conspiracy of Silence,” an investigation finalist in the 10th edition of the Premio Roberto Morrione, is a 4-part podcast written and produced by Jacopo Ottenga Barattucci, Rai project leader Dario Dionoro .