SHAFAQNA (Shia international Association) — After spending 60 days in detention in a "secure room" under the eyes of the Vatican's gendarmerie, Paolo Gabriele was released to house arrest at the weekend.
Vatican officials said he would most probably face trial on charges of stealing and leaking to Italian journalists letters and papers from the Pope's apartments within the Apostolic Palace, and that the trial would most likely start in the autumn.
His lawyers insisted at a Vatican press conference that he acted on his own initiative when he took the documents and stashed them in his Vatican apartment and denied that their client was part of any wider plot or power play within the Holy See.
Many Vatican observers have said they thought it unlikely that the 46-year-old valet was acting alone, amid reports of jostling for power to choose the Pope's eventual successor and Machiavellian manoeuvrings over alleged corruption within the Vatican administration and a measures to improve transparency within the Vatican bank, known as the Institute for Works of Religion.
"The motivations that prompted him to do certain things are all of an interior nature. There were no external motives," said Carlo Fusco, the butler's lawyer.—www.shafaqna.com/english
