Italy 'bows' in tribute on Borsellino bombing anniversary
President Sergio Mattarella and Premier Giorgia Meloni on Wednesday led the tributes on the 31st anniversary of the Via d'Amelio Cosa Nostra bombing in which anti-mafia magistrate Paolo Borsellino and five members of his security detail were murdered, Azernews reports, citing ANSA.
"On the anniversary of the Via D'Amelio massacre, the Republic bows to the memory of Paolo Borsellino, a magistrate of extraordinary valour and courage, and the agents of his security escort - Emanuela Loi, Agostino Catalano, Vincenzo Li Muli, Walter Eddie Cosina, Claudio Traina - who died with him in the service of democratic institutions," Mattarella said in a statement.
"That barbaric massacre, carried out with inhuman ferocity, hit the entire Italian population and remains indelible in our collective civil conscience".
The Via d'Amelio attack took place just two months after the Mafia assassination of Borsellino's friend and colleague Giovanni Falcone, as well as his wife Francesca Morvillo and police officers Rocco Dicillo, Antonio Montinaro and Vito Schifani by a huge bomb detonated under their cars on the Palermo-airport highway.
Mattarella paid tribute to how Borsellino and Falcone had proven that the mafia existed and shown that it "could be defeated.
"Their example invites us to overcome indifference and combat the grey areas of of complicity with the same firmness with which illegality is fought," the head of State said.
Meloni took part in a commemoration ceremony at the Palermo's Lungaro police barracks, met Chief of Police Vittorio Pisani and had an encounter with Manfredi Borsellino, the slain prosecutor's police officer son.
She then went to the Sicilian city's Santa Maria di Gesù cemetery to pay homage at the Borsellino family tomb.
"The fight against the Mafia is part of us, it is a fundamental piece of our identity, it is the moral question that guides what we do every day," Meloni said in a letter to Wednesday's edition of Il Corriere della Sera.
In the letter she described as "sickening" criticism of her failure to take part in the traditional torchlight procession in Palermo to mark the anniversary.
She said other commitments made it impossible for her to attend, adding that "I have always proudly taken part" in the procession in the past.
The leader of the centre-left opposition Democratic Party (Pd) Elly Schlein is also in Palermo on Wednesday for separate events marking the anniversary.
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