Gun that killed Mussolini resurfaces in Albania

The gun that killed Benito Mussolini in 1945 was not the executioner's weapon of choice. But it seems two Italian pistols had jammed so he used a French sub-machinegun.
For the past 47 years it has lain in the obscurity of a Tirana museum, gifted to Albania's Stalinist leaders by the man who pulled the trigger on Il Duce and his clinging lover.
With a stained wooden butt and a short leather strap, the 1938, 7.65 calibre MAS could be any of thousands of such models. But serial number F 20830 marks it as one of a kind.
The gun, with trigger well-greased, was shown to Reuters on Wednesday by Moikom Zeqo of the national museum, its first public airing since communism ended in Albania in 1991.
Shaban Sinani, general director of Albania's state archives, said the weapon was sent as a gift to communist dictator Enver Hoxha's government by Valter Audisio, one of the eight Italian partisans charged with executing the fascist dictator.
"The full agreement of source material held in two different hands, Italian and Albanian, finally ends discussion about which was the weapon that killed Mussolini," Sinani told Reuters.
Audisio met Hoxha's right-hand man Hysni Kapo while on holiday here in 1957, a time when the group that executed Mussolini faced death threats.
Writing to Tirana on the letterhead of Italy's chamber of deputies in November of the same year, Audisio revealed he was Colonel Valerio, the man who signed an account of the weapon's details published in the Italian newspaper L'Unita on September 18, 1945. "I am sending you as a gift the weapon with which - on April 28, 1945 - war criminal Benito Mussolini was executed on the orders of the Italian Partisans General Command," he wrote.
An unnamed diplomat took the gun to Albania, whose totalitarian leadership had no trouble meeting Audisio's appeal that its whereabouts be kept a strict secret.
Quoting from Audisio's book, Sinani said Audisio fired five times upon Mussolini after two pistols jammed. The bullets also killed Il Duce's lover Clara Petacci, whom the partisans had no orders to execute. She was hit because she clung to him.