A crime without truth. Forty-six years without knowing who killed Piersanti Mattarella. It was 6 January 1980 when the President of the Sicilian Region, elder brother of Head of State Sergio Mattarella, was assassinated in Palermo. The killer shot him at close range with a .38 calibre, killing him instantly and wounding his wife, Irma Chiazzese, who tried to save her husband. Piersanti Mattarella was in Via della Libertà in Palermo, driving his Fiat 132. He was on his way to mass with his wife Irma Chiazzese, seated at his side, his mother-in-law Franca Chiazzese Ballerini and daughter Maria, seated on the rear sofa.
The killer after firing 5-6 shots went towards a white Fiat 127 stopped a few metres ahead, receiving from an accomplice who was driving another .38 calibre revolver with which he fired more shots with a diagonal trajectory through the right rear window towards the victim. Shots wounded the politician's wife in one hand, who had tried to cover and protect her husband's face. His son Bernardo, who had lingered in the garage where Mattarella parked his car, also rushed up the access ramp to the garage and observed the Fiat 127 driving away down Via Libertà. The white Fiat 127 was later found, around 2 p.m., abandoned along the chute of a garage on Via Maggiore De Cristoforis, corner of Via degli Orti, about 700 metres from the scene of the crime.
Piersanti Mattarella was the president whose constant appeal had profoundly changed the consideration of Sicily in the national and international context. And who had a vision of Sicily's future based on a modern strategy of economic, social and civil development, fuelled by reforms, but also by a policy rich in ideas and culture and the utmost transparency. Mattarella had launched an action of renewal in Sicily, which had aroused a feeling of hope in all honest Sicilians and was also gaining increasing support throughout the national political system. But this action of renewal was brutally interrupted, shortly before 1 p.m. on 6 January 1980, when, while he was with his family, his wife Irma, his children Bernardo and Maria, and his mother-in-law, he was murdered in front of his home in Via Libertà, on his way back from Epiphany mass. Murdered in cold blood. The name of the killer was never known.
The new investigations
Two Mafia bosses, Antonino Madonia and Giuseppe Lucchese, both serving life sentences, are under investigation in the new investigation into Piersanti's murder. According to the investigation by the Palermo public prosecutor's office, it was Nino Madonia, son of mafia boss Ciccio, who controlled half the city, who was materially shot that day. Lucchese, known as Lucchiseddu, instead drove the car. Nino Madonia is part of a historic family of the Palermo mafia headed by the patriarch Ciccio - dead and already convicted as the instigator of Mattarella's murder - and including the suspect's brothers: Giuseppe, Salvo, the murderer of Libero Grassi, and Aldo, the latter the only one not serving a life sentence. Giuseppe Lucchese was arrested in April 1990 after nine years of absconding, considered a superkiller guilty of numerous murders. The public prosecutor's office is working on a small fingerprint. The operations are taking place at the laboratories of the Department of Biological, Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Technologies at the University of Palermo, where experts are handling the find with extreme caution.
A few months ago, the investigation by the Palermo Public Prosecutor's Office was enriched with a new, additional piece. On 24 October, a retired prefect, Filippo Piritore, a former official of the Palermo Mobile Squad, was arrested. He is accused of having hijacked the investigation into the Mattarella murder. Hearings by Palermo prosecutors on the glove found on the day of the murder on board the Fiat 127 used by the killers, which was never found or seized, Piritore is alleged to have made statements 'that turned out to be totally unsupported, with which he contributed to misleading the investigations functional (also) to the discovery of the glove (which was never found)', as the public prosecutor's office headed by Maurizio de Lucia writes.
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