They searched the van he had been using and discovered that it contained a blood-stained mattress. On 4 December, Italian authorities intercepted the vessel and arrested Fikri.

Fikri had been working in a builders’ yard in Mapello, but by the time investigators had put the pieces together, a few days later, he was on a boat bound for Tangiers. In one wiretapped conversation, in late November, the interpreter heard the phrase: “Forgive me God, I didn’t kill her”. One of these belonged to a Moroccan man called Mohammed Fikri. Her team also tried to trace the owners of all the handsets – some 15,000 – which had passed through Mapello on the day of Yara’s disappearance. Ruggeri put wiretaps on hundreds of phones. The marriage appeared strong, they had four children: Yara had an older sister, Keba, 15, and two younger brothers, Natan and Gioele, both under 10. Maura, Fulvio’s wife, was a teacher in Longuelo, a nearby town. Yara’s parents were well-known and respected: her father, Fulvio, was a large, solid man with thick glasses, an architect whose father had been the local postman, like his mother before him.

Over the next few days, Ruggeri and her team questioned every member of the Gambirasio family, looking for signs of discord or dark secrets. When the team analysed the last signals from Yara’s mobile phone, the result showed that it had been registered as present in Mapello at 18.49 that evening.Įverything seemed to point away from Yara’s family, but investigations of this type always start at home. Instead of following the expected route back to Yara’s home in Via Rampinelli, Ruggeri’s dogs went in the opposite direction, towards a small hamlet nearby called Mapello. Ruggeri called in tracker dogs: a breed of bloodhound, Segugio Italiano, with short, brown and black hair, long ears, doleful eyes and a keen sense of smell. A few people said they’d seen two men – possibly in conversation with Yara, standing near a red car – but there was little more to go on than that. Besides the large sports hall there was a running track, a swimming pool, and various courts.

The gym was part of a large sports complex, a garish building with many entrances and exits. Twenty minutes later, Yara’s father called the police. At 7.11pm, Yara’s mother phoned her daughter, but the call went straight to voicemail. From its quiet streets, lined with poplars and cypresses, you can see the wooded mountains in the distance, the peaks turning blue-grey. An hour north of Milan, and just south of the Bergamo Alps, it has a population of 8,000. The town where they lived, Brembate di Sopra, was a sedate place, on the so-called “Bergamask island” between the rivers Brembo and Adda. She said goodbye to her family, who knew where she was going, and left the house.īy 7pm, Yara had still not come home and her parents were becoming increasingly anxious. All she needed to do was drop off a stereo with her instructor. Yara, who was 13 and wore train-track braces, was preparing for her rhythmic gymnastics display the following Sunday. On Friday 26 November 2010, at 5.15pm, she left home to go to the gym, just a few hundred metres from her home. Y ara Gambirasio should only have been gone a short while.

4 pics 1 word 5 letters italy beach