During the Italian TV programme Annozero, some answers emerged to the questions that investigators had been asking for a long time on the Palermo slaughters. The first and most important one, concerning Paolo Borsellino and the negotiations that the Italian State had opened with the Mafia after the Capaci slaughter.

Claudio Martelli, Attorney General in 1992, said that the captain of the carabinieri (an Italian police force) De Donno informed magistrate Liliana Ferraro, Giovanni Falcone’s collaborator, when he was the director of criminal affairs, that he had received from Vito Ciancimino, through his son Massimo, the availability to negotiate with the Mafia on condition that there was a political support. Ferraro, according to Martelli, urged De Donno to inform the magistrate who was dealing with the Capaci slaughter, i.e. Paolo Borsellino. Ferraro met Borsellino on the 22 or 23 June 1992, thirty days after Falcone’s death and on that occasion she referred what she knew from De Donno.

So this circumstance could represent the motive for the bombing. Paolo Borsellino was probably killed because he did not agree with the negotiations. MP Antonio Di Pietro, host at the TV show Annozero, revealed that he had received a note from the Ros after the killing of Borsellino in via D’Amelio, according to which the Mafia wanted to kill Paolo Borsellino and Di Pietro. Unfortunately the communication arrived after Borsellino’s death. According to Massimo Ciancimino, his father gave an extremely negative judgement on the Mafia’s behaviour, stating that it was no longer Mafia but terrorism.

Translated by Chiara Nunnari from John Milton Institute