Never closer to truth on Borsellino

(ANSA) - Rome, September 17 - Italian investigators have "never been closer" to the truth on the July 1992 bomb slaying of anti-Mafia magistrate Paolo Borsellino, Palermo prosecutor Nino Di Matteo told the judiciary's self-governing body on Monday.
    "We are one step away from the truth about the Via d'Amelio massacre," he told the Supreme Council of Magistrates.
    "Never as now have we been closer to the truth. And that is thanks to me and other magistrates".
    Di Matteo went on: "it's not right that these magistrates should be linked to cover-ups and that charge is a tool of those who don't want progress to be made".
    Di Matto said the removal from the bomb scene of Borsellino's personal diary was the "first action of trying to throw investigators off the track".
    He said that the slain magistrate had noted down in it "very serious things". "And there is no doubt there was a negotiation in those days between the ROS security police and (late boss of bosses Salvatore) Riina with (Massimo) Ciancimino playing go-between".
    "Today it is known that Borsellino on July 15 spoke to his wife of a high-ranking ROS officer who had been a friend of his previously.
    "The mafiosi carried out the massacre but the theft of the red diary can't have been done by the person who pressed the (detonator) button".
    The magistrate, who is under round-the-clock police protection, spoke of "very high prices" paid by himself and his family in the search for the truth.
    On July 19, the 26th anniversary of the assassination, President Sergio Mattarella said that "honouring the memory of magistrate Borsellino and the persons escorting him also means not stopping to seek the truth on that massacre".
    "26 years on," said Mattarella, "the memories and emotion for the cowardly attack in Via d'Amelio (in Palermo) are still alive".
    Borsellino lost his life along with five officers in his police escort: Agostino Catalano, Walter Eddie Cosina, Vincenzo Li Muli, Emanuela Loi and Claudio Traina.
    He was murdered by a massive car bomb outside his mother's house two months after a huge bomb on the the highway to Palermo airport killed his friend and colleague Giovanni Falcone.
    Falcone died along with three bodyguards and his wife, Italian magistrate Francesca Morvillo, on May 23, 1992.
    Cosa Nostra bosses including the late Salvatore Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano as well as Giovanni Brusca, have been condemned for the killings, part of a Mafia reign of terror when members of Italian institutions instituted tough prison conditions, Italian prosecutors have said.
    One of the mysteries linked to the Borsellino slaying is the disappearance of a bag containing his personal diary, investigative sources say.
    Prosecutors are still trying to establish who stole it and what exactly it contained.
    There is also the shadow of alleged State-mafia talks over the two bomb slayings of Falcone and Borsellino.
    Prosecutors have said that those negotiations "accelerated" Riina's decision to assassinate Borsellino.
    Sicilian prosecutors have called the investigation into the Borsellino killing "the biggest cover-up in Italian history".