Rome -(Ass Mess): Mamma Mia! The Rome Carabineri were busy last weekend smashing yet another satanic child molestor ring consisting of...er, three middle aged women teachers - two of whom are elderly grandmothers who teach at a Sunday school - a woman janitor, a petrol pump attendant and a children's film producer.
The swoop followed months of covert activity after parents in the town of Rignano Flaminio complained their children had described weird 'games' consisting of a "a wolf (who)chases a squirrel and eats it" and a "man in black who wore a hood and drank his own blood."
The news is starkly reminiscent of events in a South Ronaldsay satanic child abuse scandal started by Scottish social workers some fifteen years ago.
In that incident over-zealous public officials who had trained in satanic ritual abuse detection at a US college run by the Reverend Pat Robertson broke up over ten families and took their children into care because of children's stories of playing games poking fun at strange men in black hoods, a fantasy that later turned out to be a silly parody of the local church vicar's clerical vestments.
Three years of painstaking detection proved that it was all hogwash, that the kids had been having a laugh, that social workers were determined to root out a non-existent evil and that the ringleader of the social services investigation team had been promised a wacking great big pay cheque from a film company for the exlusive rights to her documented report on the phenomenon.
As Rome prosecutors study the Carbineri's evidence this week the town's residents are up in arms sayingn that someone somewhere has framed the arrested suspects, none of whom has ever had so much as a parking ticket in their lives let alone a criminal record.
"Something very weird is going on here," said the town's Mayor Luigi della Santossa.
