Mario Lozano (b. 1969/1970) is a United States Army specialist, best known for once being indicted by an Italian court for his role in the death of Italian Secret Service officer Nicola Calipari in a supposed incident on Route Irish, immediately following the Rescue of Giuliana Sgrena. Lozano was not the only American soldier involved in this incident, but received much more attention because he was the one who fired the machine gun killing Calipari. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion of the 69th Infantry Regiment, 42nd Infantry Division of the New York Army National Guard, based in Manhattan. In 2007, a superior Italian court decided that Italy had no jurisdiction in this case—though renewed, this motivation has been since dubbed as wrong by the High Jury Italian court in 2008. Early life and education Lozano is largely of Puerto Rican ancestry, although he has a paternal grandfather who was half Sicilian ancestry. He is a native of the Bronx borough of New York City, New York. Career Involvement in the death of Nicola Calipari Lozano shot and killed Secret Service agent Nicola Calipari in Baghdad during a disputed incident at BP 541, a blocking position (a loose term indicating a mobile roadblock that allows no traffic to pass) located behind a ninety-degree turn on the ramp joining Route Vernon to Route Irish. (The road was between the heavily fortified Green Zone and Baghdad International Airport.) Calipari was returning from a successful rescue mission to liberate Giuliana Sgrena, an Italian independent journalist, detained by Iraqi insurgents. Both Sgrena and a colleague of Calipari, Andrea Carpani, were wounded in the shooting. Lozano and members of his squad had been directed to set up the blocking position as part of security measures for Ambassador John Negroponte's convoy from the city to the airport. Although the ambassador's convoy had already passed twenty minutes earlier, a communications failure with the dispatching unit (which had just deployed to Iraq, and was on the job for the first time), meant that Lozano's squad had been in place for more than eighty minutes, sixty-five minutes over the customary length. An internal U.S. Army investigation cleared Lozano of any wrongdoing and concluded that he acted within the standing rules of engagement. It was pointed out during the Army investigation that Calipari, who had previously been in contact with the United States Embassy in Baghdad and had previously