The attempt by the Italian Deputy Minister for Justice to politically damage opponents by releasing confidential information about one of Italy’s most famous prisoners has backfired to the extent that the now ex-Minister is facing a prison sentence of his own.

The ex-Minister is Andrea Delmastro. Readers will recall his forced resignation in March this year when it was revealed that he was a partner in a restaurant with a family whose father has prior criminal convictions for laundering organised crime money through restaurants. The father also worked at the restaurant in Rome.

Mr Delmastro has other troubles. He was convicted in February last year of knowingly releasing government documents that were classified secret, and was handed an eight-month prison sentence.

Prime Minister Meloni allowed him to remain as Minister while the appeal proceeded.

Last week, the intermediate appeals court of Rome dismissed Mr Delmastro’s appeal against conviction and sentence. La Republic has the footage.

He will now proceed with an appeal to the highest appellate court, the Cassazione.

The prisoner at the centre of the story is Alfredo Cospito, now aged 59, a lifelong self-proclaimed anarchist and nihilist.

Mr Cospito started his career by refusing to participate in national service, for which he was sentenced to a year in prison. After a few years of political agitation he moved on to using political violence.

In 2019, he was convicted of domestic terrorism offences, namely for being part of a group of anarchists who sent small parcel bombs through the post to various Italian politicians and office holders.

Appropriately, for a group of anarchists, they called themselves “The Informal Federation of Anarchists”. The group was exposed, and members arrested after two members of the group were blown up in an explosion in their small bomb making facility.

Cospito is now serving a 23-year sentence. He is well known in Italy because of his protests about being subjected to the severely restrictive prison conditions known as “carcere duro” – harsh prison – since 2022.

He appealed the conditions of his custody all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, but it was dismissed on September 4, 2025.

For many years, he has been on a partial hunger strike. There are occasional public demonstrations of support for him from other anarchists, often resulting in more arrests.

Probably, because of his campaign against the harsh prison conditions, Mr Cospito was visited in prison in late January 2023 by four parliamentary members of the opposition Democratic Party.

Mr Delmastro heard about this and, in his role of Deputy Minister for Justice, obtained some documents from the head of the Prisons Department.

On January 31, 2023, Giovanni Donzelli, a backbencher from Delmastro’s party, the Fratelli d’Italia party led by Prime Minister Meloni, criticised those MPs for the visit and alleged they had links to anarchists and the Mafia.

He also used some information in his speech in parllament that was taken from documents provided by the Prison’s Department, which were marked ‘not available to the public’ and therefore not available for use in parliamentary debates.

The documents may have included information about secret police surveillance of the prisoners. Donzelli later said that Mr Delmastro had given him the documents – and this has not been denied.

The issue in the criminal proceedings against Mr Delmastro has been whether the prison documents could be categorised as containing official secrets, thus placing him in breach of s.326 of the Italian Criminal Code (release or use of official secrets), or whether they were merely documents with restrictions on their circulation.

In the alternative, Delmastro has denied knowing that the documents contained official secrets.

In both the trial and the appeal, the prosecution expressed doubt as to whether the documents did contain official secrets, but the judges entered convictions.

This has been seized upon by members of the Meloni government as yet another example of “red judges” oppressing members of right-wing parties.

The status of the documents is now an issue that the appeal Court of Cassazione will have to decide some time in the future.

Mr Delmastro, the ex-second law officer of Italy, remains on bail.