New York (AFP)
Italian journalist Paolo Borrometi received Wednesday the Peter Mackler Award, which rewards courage and journalistic ethics, for his coverage of the Sicilian mafia, which earned him death threats and aggression.
Born in 1983 in Ragusa, in the south of Sicily, Paolo Borrometi worked for the Italian agency AGI before founding, in 2013, the information website La Spia.
He has been the subject of police protection since 2014, when he had to leave Sicily to settle in Rome as a security measure.
That year, he was, in fact, the victim of an assault by two masked men that caused him permanent injury to his shoulder.
Also in 2014, his family's house in Modica was targeted by an attempted arson.
In 2018, judicial listening helped to thwart an attempt to attack him.
For years, Paolo Borrometi has been documenting the Mafia's activities in agribusiness, mainly controlled by the Syrcause and Ragusa clans.
The Peter Mackler Award was created in memory of AFP's former editor-in-chief for North America, who died suddenly in 2008 from cardiac arrest.
It was presented Wednesday by the wife of Peter Mackler, Catherine Antoine, in the premises of the School of Journalism of the University of the City of New York (CUNY).
Paolo Borrometi has dedicated the prize to Daphne Caruana Galizia, an investigative journalist killed in Malta in an attack in 2017, to Antonio Megalizzi, a journalist killed during the December 11, 2018 attack on the Strasbourg Christmas market, and Giulio Regeni , student tortured to death by the Egyptian police in 2016 according to the Italian press.
"I'm afraid to die, that's right," said the reporter, through an interpreter. "I do not know if I will ever have a family, children, but I dreamed of being a journalist, (...) and I am a journalist."
"I like this job," he added. "I like the free exercise of journalism."
The Peter Mackler Award is administered by the Global Media Forum, in partnership with RSF and Agence France-Presse.
© 2019 AFP