Italy wants the United States to punish its soldiers who shot dead an Italian secret service agent in Iraq in what Rome is describing as "an unfortunate incident". Addressing parliament over the incident Tuesday, Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini said Italy would be demanding "truth and justice" in the name of the "time-honoured and renewed friendship with the USA". "We hope that (U.S.) expressions of goodwill regarding its loyal collaboration will lead to important and concrete results within a matter of hours," Fini told lawmakers. Fini ruled out that U.S. soldiers had knowingly sought to kill Giuliana Sgrena, the Italian journalist freed by Italian agents moments earlier, describing events leading to the death of Nicola Calipari as "an accident". "The hypothesis of an attempt on the life of Giuliana Sgrena is baseless, it was an accident that needs to be clarified," Fini said. His words followed statements issued on Monday by Washington, in which charges that American troops may have deliberately targeted Sgrena and killed Calipari as he sought to protect her were flatly rejected as "absurd". Sgrena, who had been held hostage by Iraqi insurgents for a month, has suggested that U.S. troops may have been trying to intentionally take her life because they may have been irked by the fact that her release had been secured by the payment of a ransom. --more 1456 Local Time 1156 GMT
