Massacre of Via D'Amelio
The buildings where magistrate Paolo Borsellino's mother lived. The bomb exploded while Borsellino was walking to the entrance gate.
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| Location | Palermo, Sicily |
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| Coordinates | 38°08′35″N 13°21′17″E / 38.143056°N 13.354722°ECoordinates: 38°08′35″N 13°21′17″E / 38.143056°N 13.354722°E |
| Date | July 19, 1992 4:58 PM |
| Target | Paolo Borsellino |
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Attack type
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Terrorism |
| Weapons | bomb |
| Deaths | 6 |
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Suspected perpetrators
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Sicilian Mafia |
The via D'Amelio bombing (Italian: Strage di via D'Amelio) was a terrorist bombing that took place in Palermo, Sicily, on 19 July 1992. It claimed the life of anti-mafia magistrate Paolo Borsellino and those of five members of his police escort: Agostino Catalano, Emanuela Loi (the first Italian female member of a police escort and the first one to be killed), Vincenzo Li Muli, Walter Eddie Cosina and Claudio Traina.
The so-called agenda rossa, the red notebook in which Borsellino used to write down details of his investigations and which he always carried on his person, disappeared from the site in the moments after the explosion. A carabinieri officer who was present when the explosion occurred reported that he had delivered the notebook to Giuseppe Ayala, the first Palermo magistrate to arrive at the scene. Ayala, who stated that he had refused to receive it, was later criticized for saying that escorts to anti-mafia judges should be reduced, despite evidence of further failed attempts on them in subsequent years.
The bombing occurred at 4:58 PM on 19 July 1992, 57 days after the bombing of Capaci, in which Borsellino's friend, anti-mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone, had been killed with his wife and police escort. The only survivor of the escort in the massacre of Via D'Amelio, Antonino Vullo, declared that the judge had stayed in his summer residence outside Palermo from 1:30 pm to around 4:00 pm, when he and the escort drove to Via D'Amelio in the Sicilian capital, where he was to meet his mother. When they arrived, Vullo and the other agents noticed nothing unusual except some parked cars. The car in which Borsellino had been travelling exploded, along with one of the escort cars, while Vullo was sitting in a third car.
The bomb, containing some 100 kg of TNT, had been placed in a Fiat 126. Normal procedure when Borsellino travelled was to clear the road of cars before his arrival, but this was not allowed by the administration of the comune of Palermo, as reported by another anti-mafia judge, Antonino Caponnetto.Gaspare Spatuzza, a mafioso who later became a pentito, eventually revealed that he had stolen the Fiat 126 on the orders of the Graviano and Brancaccio mafia clans.
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Wikipedia