Italian political leaders on Friday
honoured the memory of anti-mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone
and four others murdered with him in a bomb blast set off by the
Sicilian Mafia 22 years ago.
Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo and police officers
Rocco Dicillo, Antonio Montinaro and Vito Schifani were killed
in an explosion on May 23, 1992 as they sped along the motorway
from the Palermo airport to the city in what has come to be
known as the Capaci Massacre, for name of the town where it took
place.
The assassination was ordered by the fugitive Sicilian boss
of crime bosses Salvatore "Toto'" Riina in retaliation for the
maxi-trial headed by Falcone, which had ended in definitive
Supreme Court convictions for Riina and 360 others in January
1992.
"May 23, thinking of Vito, Rocco Antonio. Of Francesca. Of
him, Giovanni, who taught our students to fight the mafia,"
wrote Premier Matteo Renzi on the social network Twitter.
In a ceremony held in in the Bunker hall of Palermo's
Ucciardone prison, where the original maxi-trial took place in
the 1980s, a girl read a message from President Giorgio
Napolitano.
Senate Speaker Pietro Grasso - a prominent anti-mafia
prosecutor prior to becoming senator - at the same ceremony
called for battling economic crimes of all forms "from working
off the books to corruption".
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