Berlusconi warned: ‘More pictures to come’

The Italian photographer Antonello Zappadu, who sparked an international scandal with his pictures of the former Czech prime minister Mirek Topolanek, naked and semi-aroused, in the company of scantily clad girls at Silvio Berlusconi's Sardinian villa, has warned the Italian Prime Minister that there are more where they came from.

When Berlusconi blocked publication of Zappadu's photos in Italy - though not in the Spanish paper El Pais - prosecutors confiscated a disc of 700 long-lens snaps, including photos of girls around the pool at the Villa Certosa, and the notorious Topolanek pictures. But there are still 5,000 photos at large, Zappadu revealed last week, taken either at the villa or at the nearby Olbia airport in Sardinia, between 2006 and 2009. "Let me say there is nothing compromising," Zappadu said. "But I would say the images are politically embarrassing."
 
Among these photos, thought to be in safe-keeping abroad, are some of a "fake wedding" that Zappadu insists took place between the 72-year-old Prime Minister and a woman in her twenties last September. Zappadu told journalists that 90 per cent of the guests at the wedding were not "seasoned women [but] a sea of young beautiful girls". He added: "I cannot answer why they were there but I can have my suspicions."
 
Zappadu, 54, began his career in serious international reportage, coming to prominence in 1992 when he and another photographer helped rescue a seven-year-old boy, Farouk Kassam, who had been kidnapped and mutilated by Sardinian bandits. These days, however, Zappadu is more likely to be found on Sardinia's Costa Smeralda, snapping celebrities on their yachts.

Yet while Berlusconi's supporters have branded him a lecherous paparazzo, Zappadu insists his latest pictures are creating debate about press freedom - "real freedom, not Berlusconi's version".
 
Berlusconi claims to use the Villa Certosa for state occasions, says Zappadu, but asks: "Should that give him a licence to do whatever he likes there? It has become virtual sacrilege for someone to suggest, for example, that it is wrong for Italian soldiers to be used not for sentry duty or security but to allow partying."
 
Meanwhile Berlusconi is claiming that his rivals are now plotting a "palace coup" to unseat him. "There is a campaign of scandals against me," the embattled PM told a group of industrialists on Saturday. "It is a subversive plan because its aim is to bring down a prime minister and to put in his place another not elected by Italians. If that is not subversion, tell me what is." ·