Pressure mounted yesterday for a judicial inquiry into an enduring murder mystery in Italy, with the Mayor of Rome asking prosecutors to reopen the case into the killing of the poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini.

His call was endorsed by 700 intellectuals, who signed a petition calling for a new investigation. They say that Pasolini was killed because he was about to reveal a political cover-up of murder and corruption in the international oil business.

Pasolini, the left-wing director of The Gospel According to St Matthew and The Canterbury Tales, was bludgeoned to death in November 1975 and run over repeatedly with his car at the beach resort of Ostia, near Rome. It was assumed at the time that the attack was related to Pasolini’s overt homo-sexuality and involvement in the gay scene in Rome.

Pino Pelosi, a rent boy then aged 17, admitted to the murder and was convicted. On his release two years ago he retracted his confession. Pelosi refused to name the real killers, saying that his life was at risk.

Walter Veltroni, the Mayor of Rome, said that after Pelosi’s admission the Rome city council had opened an inquiry, led by Guido Calvi, a lawyer and senator. The findings will be presented to prosecutors soon.

“It is right that new light should be shed on a murder that robbed Rome, Italy and the world of such a major figure,” Mr Veltroni said yesterday. As a communist student in the 1960s and 1970s he met Pasolini frequently.

Gianni Borgna, a former left-wing radical, who is director of the Rome Music Auditorium, said that at the time of his death Pasolini was writing a novel entitled Petroleum, which he said was a thinly disguised account of the death in an aircraft crash of Enrico Mattei, the controversial head of ENI, the Italian energy group.

Mattei, a former left-wing partisan, who built up first Agip, the Italian Petroleum Agency, and then ENI, the National Hydrocarbon Trust, as global players, clashed frequently with multinational energy companies, which felt that he was treading on their turf. Under him ENI negotiated oil concessions in the Middle East, Africa and the Soviet Union, undercutting the global majors with the principle that the country that owned the energy reserves should receive 75 per cent of the profits.

Mattei died in October 1962 when his private aircraft crashed in Lombardy. The crash was attributed to a storm. When Mattei’s remains and those of his pilot were exhumed in 1995 as part of a new investigation, “metal debris deformed by an explosion” was found in the bones. The theory of sabotage was supported by Pasolini and his fellow director Francesco Rosi, who made The Mattei Case. A journalist, Mauro De Mauro, who helped Rosi with the script, disappeared in 1970 and has never been found. 14 Number of awards Pasolini won for his films, including the 1972 Golden Bear at Berlin for The Canterbury Tales and the 1974 Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes for Flower of the Arabian Nights Source: IMDb

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