For months, the Messina Prosecutor's Office has been investigating the latest chapter in one of the most serious cover-ups in the country's history: the "tampering" of the investigation into the Via D'Amelio massacre, the fabricated repentants, and the false reconstructions of the massacre that cost the lives of Judge Paolo Borsellino and his bodyguards.
A convenient truth, which has led to unjust life sentences, so far attributed only to the officers who conducted the investigation, currently on trial in Caltanissetta. Today, in addition to the three police officers Mario Bo, Fabrizio Mattei, and Michele Ribaudo, two magistrates are under investigation: former prosecutors Annamaria Palma and Carmelo Petralia, formerly members of the team that investigated the 92 massacres, now respectively the State Attorney General in Palermo and Deputy Prosecutor in Catania. And it was precisely the involvement of a magistrate serving in the Catania Prosecutor's Office that triggered the jurisdiction of their colleagues in Messina. Palma and Petralia are charged with aggravated slander for having aided and abetted Cosa Nostra, in collusion with the three police officers on trial. They are alleged, each in their respective roles, to have fabricated false informants like Vincenzo Scarantino, inducing them to lie and accuse people they knew to be innocent of the massacre. Both magistrates were today notified of unrepeatable technical investigations. The same order was communicated to the potential victims of the crime, convicted, precisely because of the cover-up, for a massacre that never occurred: Urso, La Mattina, Murana, Scotto, Gambino, and Vernengo, who served 18 years in prison for false accusations by induced informants. The technical investigations that the Messina prosecutors will have to carry out, which cannot be repeated due to the risk of the evidence being lost, concern the tapes containing recordings of conversations with Vincenzo Scarantino, the Guadagna "picciotto" who was interviewed while under protection, a period during which, according to the prosecution's hypothesis, he was induced, sometimes with violence, to lie by the team of police investigating the attack. The police officers on trial today were part of the team of investigators, led by the deceased former head of the Palermo Flying Squad, Arnaldo La Barbera. The tapes are very dated, the wiretaps date back to the early 90s, and listening to them could damage them: hence the need for the investigation, which has never been conducted before, to include consultants for the suspects and the injured parties. According to the prosecution, Scarantino was beaten and threatened to give the version "devised" by the investigators. He was also forced to memorize the lies to repeat during interrogations. The false informer, who made sensational retractions, later revealed the pressure he was subjected to. Depending on the mood of the moment, he attributed it solely to the police or even to former prosecutors. The Messina prosecutor's office is trying, a daunting task given the years that have passed, to determine who hatched the plots that led to the cover-up and, above all, what the motive was: the cover-up of Cosa Nostra elements, who ultimately went unpunished, or the search for an easy culprit.
Article published on June 11, 2019 - 22:11 AM - Editorial Staff
