The magazine L’Espresso on Tuesday reported that the release of a boss of the Sicilian Mafia Cosa Nostra has caused a stir in Italy.
According to media reports, the mafioso Giovanni Brusca was set free in Rome on Monday evening at the end of his 25-year sentence.
He remains under guard, however, and for the next four years he would be subject to so-called freedom under supervision.
Some Italian politicians reacted indignantly to the release. Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi of the populist Five Star Movement tweeted that “this is an unacceptable disgrace.’’
Mara Carfagna, Minister for Southern Italy from the conservative Forza Italia said Brusca’s release was a technically unavoidable act, but morally unacceptable.
The leader of the Social Democrats, Enrico Letta, spoke on radio on Tuesday of a “punch in the stomach.”
Brusca was considered a confidant of the notorious Mafia boss Salvatore Riina from Corleone in Sicily.
According to L’Espresso, he once admitted to being involved in a bomb attack in 1992 in which the lawyer and Mafia hunter Giovanni Falcone was killed on a motorway near Palermo.
He is also said to have admitted his complicity in the murder of the son of a former mafioso. who was involved in the assassination of Falcone and who cooperated with the police after his arrest.
A group of the Cosa Nostra had held the child captive at the time and blackmailed the father with photos. Later, the child was allegedly strangled and then dissolved in acid.
Brusca was arrested in May 1996, cooperated with the investigators himself and testified as a witness in several trials.
dpa/NAN
