Via D'Amelio massacre
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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Assassination |
| Weapons | Car 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 an attack by the Sicilian Mafia which took place in Palermo, Sicily, on 19 July 1992. It killed anti-mafia magistrate Paolo Borsellino and 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 on duty), 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 he had delivered the notebook to Giuseppe Ayala, the first Palermo magistrate to arrive at the scene. Ayala, who said he had refused to receive it, was later criticized for saying 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, said 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 he had stolen the Fiat 126 on the orders of the Graviano and Brancaccio mafia clans.
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Wikipedia