“I’m glad to be back home”. These are the first words that little Eitan said to the agent who accompanied him home, in the village of Travaco Siccomario, after his return to Italy. Happiness and emotion among the family members for what seems, at least apparently, the end of the ordeal for the 6-year-old boy who, after losing his parents and his little brother in the Mottarone tragedy, found himself in the midst of a bitter controversy between families on the part of father and mother and to live in a country he left when he was just over a year old and where he then spent his holidays. The little boy returned to Italy, where he will live “permanently”, last night after being kidnapped and taken to Israel last September by his maternal grandfather Shmuel Peleg.
The lawyers renewed the appeal “to allow Eitan to resume his life as a 6-year-old child”. Now, they said, “the spotlight on his private life is turned off” and “a new phase opens up” that will allow him “a more peaceful growth path, even more necessary if we consider the terrible tragedy that involved him”. With a Tel Aviv-Bergamo flight, which landed at 10 pm sharp, Eitan thus returns to what, after the accident, has become his new Italian home in the province of Pavia. With him were his paternal aunt Aya Biran, named his guardian immediately after the accident, her husband Or Nirko and the two cousins ​​with whom he practically grew up and who, in the aftermath of his kidnapping, also joined him in the state of the Middle East.
Yesterday was the day of greetings and preparations for him. In a ‘neutral’ space and in the presence of a social worker, he first saw his grandfather Shmuel and then, separately, his ex-wife, grandmother Esther Cohen: with them he will continue to speak on the phone while with his uncles on his mother’s side. the promise and to meet soon in Italy. Then the tampon for him and his relatives. With his return, although the game between the two families is still open before the Juvenile Court, the child should therefore begin a normal life, surrounded by the affection of close friends and relatives. Everyone’s goal is to help him forget the trauma he experienced that afternoon on May 23rd, when a trip to the mountains turned into a terrible tragedy. A tragedy for Eitan even more painful since he found himself being disputed between the two families who did not spare each other a ‘war’ made up of appeals and counter-appeals to the Italian and Israeli judges, with all due respect for that “good of the minor” invoked. from both sides. A story, this, which a few days ago, however, the Supreme Court of Tel Aviv tried to put a firm point. Judge Alex Stein, confirming the two decisions of the past weeks of first and second instance, established that the “normal place of life” of the child “is in Italy where he spent almost his entire life” and that what happened to him in September there was a kidnapping to which the International Convention of The Hague provides for “zero tolerance” and imposes ” international arrest on charges of kidnapping, abduction and detention of a minor abroad and misappropriation of the grandchild’s passport. The alleged accomplice of Peleg, the “soldier” of the US contractor agency Blackwater, Gabriel Alon Abutbul, also Israeli and against whom the extradition procedure is underway, is arrested in Cyprus and released on bail. international arrest on charges of kidnapping, abduction and detention of a minor abroad and misappropriation of the grandchild’s passport. The alleged accomplice of Peleg, the “soldier” of the US contractor agency Blackwater, Gabriel Alon Abutbul, also Israeli and against whom the extradition procedure is underway, is arrested in Cyprus and released on bail.
