Italy on Thursday deplored the death of an Italian aid worker in a U.S. airstrike, calling it a "fatal error" by the Americans but nevertheless appreciating the U.S. president for taking responsibility for it.
Italian Premier Matteo Renzi expressed his "profound pain" over Giovanni Lo Porto's death and offered Italy's condolences to Lo Porto's family and that of American Warren Weinstein, who was killed in the same airstrike on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Both were held hostage by al-Qaida.
President Barack Obama said Thursday they were killed in a January strike on what the U.S. believed was an al-Qaida compound with no civilians present.
In a statement, Renzi said Obama had informed him of the death in a phone call Wednesday and that Lo Porto's family was subsequently informed. He said he appreciated Obama's "transparency" in taking responsibility.
Italy's Foreign Ministry called Lo Porto a "generous and expert volunteer" who was working in Pakistan for Welthungerhilfe, a German aid group, when he was taken hostage in 2012.
The Foreign Ministry said it had worked for three years to track him down and return him to his family.
"The conclusion unfortunately was different because of the tragic and fatal error of our American allies recognized by President Obama," the ministry said in a statement.
"We're shattered by today's news," Simone Pott, a spokeswoman for Welthungerhilfe, told The Associated Press. "So much was done to try and get him released," she said, without elaborating.
Lo Porto had joined the aid group in October 2011 and was working as a project manager in Pakistan's Multan region when he was kidnapped in January 2012, together with German Bernd Muehlenbeck.
Muehlenbeck was freed last year in circumstances that Pott declined to comment on.
Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni was to brief Parliament about the case on Friday amid questions about the timing of the announcement.
"It's normal that we would have preferred to have given the news at the same time to the families," Renzi told reporters, citing time zone differences between the U.S. and Italy that interfered with a coordinated release of information.
But he insisted that Italy only learned Lo Porto had been in the compound on Wednesday, that he wanted to give Lo Porto's family time to grieve and that what matters most was to "respect the pain of a mother who will never see her son again."
Renzi also stressed that the strike was not a "blitz" intended to free the hostages. It was a reference to the 2012 botched British raid to free an Italian and British hostage held in Nigeria in which both hostages were killed by their captors. Italy wasn't told about the rescue plan before it began.
"It's not that the U.S. was looking to free hostages and didn't advise us," Renzi said. "It was an intervention which, long afterwards, they realized it wasn't al Qaida terrorists but that there were two other people there."
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