The release of a Mafia boss who confessed to playing a part in more than 100 murders has been condemned.
Sicilian head honcho Giovanni Brusca’s grisly crimes include having an 11-year-old child’s body dissolved in acid.
He also admitted to the assassination of Italy’s top prosecutor Giovanni Falcone.
The mobster was was arrested in 1996 for detonating a bomb that killed five people – including the anti-Mafia judge.
He has now been freed after 25 years in prison, outraging his victims’ relatives and top politicians.
Brusca became an informant, helping to hunt down fellow criminals to bring them to justice.
(Image: Sipa/REX/Shutterstock)
Tina Montinaro, the wife of one of the bodyguards killed, told the Repubblica newspaper she was “indignant”.
She fumed: “The state is against us, after 29 years we still don’t know the truth about the massacre – and Giovanni Brusca, the man who destroyed my family, is free.”
Infamous Brusca, now 64, was involved in around 150 hits and was a key figure within the Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia group.
(Image: FUSCO/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
“He has collaborated with justice only to get the benefits, it was not a personal, intimate choice,” said Rosaria Costa, the widow of a policeman who died in the Falcone bombing.
The country has always faced a long and violent struggle against organised crime.
A number of Italian politicians have reacted with anger at his release.
Matteo Salvini, leader of the right-wing League party, said his victims deserved better.
(Image: Tony Gentile)
“After 25 years in prison, the Mafia boss Giovanni Brusca is a free man. This is not the ‘justice’ that Italians deserve,” he said.
Enrico Letta, the leader of the centre-left Democratic party, told a local radio station: “It is a punch in the stomach that leaves you breathless.”
The Mafia boss will be on parole for four years, it is reported.
“Regardless of what one may think of the atrocities he committed at the time, there was a collaboration – let us not forget that he gave information on bombings both in Sicily and in mainland Italy”, chief anti-mafia prosecutor Federico Cafiero De Raho told Reuters.
“Clearly, the judges believed this was the appropriate jail term.”