Borsellino investigation misdirected: two former prosecutors investigated for massacre

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 police 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, there are two magistrates in the register of suspects: the former prosecutors Annamaria Palma and Carmelo Petralia, formerly in the team that investigated the massacres of '92, today respectively the Attorney General of the State in Palermo and the Deputy Prosecutor in Catania. And it was precisely the involvement of a magistrate serving at the Catania Prosecutor's Office that triggered the expertise of his colleagues from Messina. In Palma and Petralia, the crime of slander aggravated by having favored Cosa Nostra is contested, in collaboration with the three police officials on trial. They would have, each in their own roles, constructed false repentants like Vincenzo Scarantino, inducing them to lie and accuse people they knew were innocent of the massacre. Both magistrates were notified today of the notice of unrepeatable technical investigations. The same measure was communicated to the potential offenders of the crime, convicted, precisely by virtue of the diversion, for a massacre that was never committed: Urso, La Mattina, Murana, Scotto, Gambino and Vernengo, who spent 18 years in hard prison for the false accusations of fed informants. The technical acts that the Messina prosecutors will have to carry out, and which cannot be repeated because there is a risk that the evidence will be lost, concern the cassettes with the recordings of the conversations of Vincenzo Scarantino, the Guadagna picciotto listened to while he was under protection, a period in which, according to an accusatory hypothesis, he would have been induced, even with violence, by the pool of police officers investigating the attack, to lie. The pool of investigators, led by the former head of the Palermo Mobile Squad Arnaldo La Barbera, who later died, included the police officers who were put on trial today. 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 consultants of the suspects and the injured parties to participate in the investigation, which has never been carried out before. According to the prosecution, Scarantino was beaten and threatened to make him give the convenient version "thought up" by the investigators. And forced to learn by heart the nonsense to repeat during interrogations. The false repentant, protagonist of sensational retractions, later revealed the pressure he was subjected to. Attributing them, depending on the mood of the moment, only 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 their motive was: to cover up elements of Cosa Nostra, who then effectively went unpunished, or to search for an easy culprit.