Falcone’s friend and colleague Paolo Borsellino was killed two months later, along with five police officers, by another huge Cosa Nostra bomb.
“Magistrates like Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino demolished the belief that the mafia was a parallel order, revealing what the mafia really is – a cancer for the civil community, a criminal organisation that is not invincible in the slightest, deprived on any honour or dignity,” Mattarella said in a message on the anniversary.
“The effort to combat the mafia syndicates must continue with commitment and increasingly greater determination.
“One of Giovanni Falcone’s teachings, that the mafia can be beaten and is destined to end, always remains with us.”
Falcone led the investigation that culminated in the so-called Maxi Trial in which more than 300 people were convicted, in the process proving that the Sicilian Mafia actually did exist, something that was not universally accepted at the time.
Falcone and Borsellino were killed in a bombing campaign launched by Cosa Nostra after the supreme court upheld the Maxi Trial convictions, making them definitive.
Mattarella is the brother of Piersanti Mattarella, the Sicilian governor who was murdered by the mafia in 1980.
Meloni said that the 1992 Capaci bomb attack was part of the reason she went into politics.
“I was 15 years of age 31 years ago and I was shocked by the brutality of that campaign of mafia bombings,” she said at a ceremony in Palermo.
“I decided to get involved in politics because I saw it as the most useful instrument to do something, to not remain with my hands in my pockets.
“The arrest of (Mafia boss) Matteo Messina Denaro (in January this year after he spent 30 years on the run) is a demonstration of the tireless commitment of many men and women of the public institutions.”
The prime minister said that the “pain caused by those murders is indelible”.
ANSA
