Investigators fear Mafia linked to secret services: Inquiries into last year's murder of two judges have opened a sinister new trail

SICILIAN magistrates are investigating suspicions that members of the Italian secret services connived with the Mafia in the assassinations of the anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

The sinister new trail in the investigations was disclosed as Italy marked the first anniversary of the bomb that destroyed Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards on a highway near Palermo on 23 May last year. The murder, and that of his successor, Borsellino, two months later, shook the nation, turned much of Sicilian public opinion against the Mafia and prompted some members to turn into valuable pentiti, or supergrasses. It also galvanised the authorities into seriously combating the Mafia, with considerable successes.

Church bells rang out across Italy on the eve of the tragedy's anniversary and many television stations showed a long programme about the Mafia, led by Maurizio Costanzo, an anti-Mafia journalist thought to have been the target of last week's car-bomb attack in Rome. Yesterday, a minute's silence was observed in all the schools, while in Palermo children formed a human chain in the district where Falcone was born, trees were planted, masses, conferences and demonstrations planned.

The latest disclosure was made by Giovanni Tinebra, the chief public prosecutor of Caltanissetta, who is leading investigations into the murders of Falcone and Borsellino. The Falcone assassination, he said, was 'undoubtedly of a Mafia stamp'. But his team was investigating the possibility of 'co-interests between the Mafia and tainted elements in the (state) institutions'.

They were looking at the 'grey area of collusion between Cosa Nostra and the men of the institutions', by which Mr Tinebra meant the Italian security services.

The magistrates are reportedly interested, among other things, in the activities of Bruno Contrada, a top Sicilian security official who has been in a military jail since December on suspicion of passing top secret information to his Mafia contacts.

It is not the first time 'deviant' elements in the security services have been suspected of subversive activities. In the late 1960s they were blamed for massacres in a 'strategy of tension' believed to have been designed to destabilise the country, discredit the left wing, and shift public opinion to the right. Whether any politicians were behind this, and if so who, has never been established. Later, leading members were discovered to belong to the sinister P2 masonic lodge which aimed to infiltrate all areas of public life and eventually to take over.

Investigators want to know who told the Mafia that Falcone was planning a swim at his seaside house on the morning in 1989 that 58 sticks of dynamite were found in a bag on the beach. After that first attempt on his life Falcone said: 'We are faced with highly sophisticated minds who are trying to guide certain actions of the Mafia. Perhaps links exist between the top levels of Cosa Nostra and hidden power centres which have other interests. I think this is the most plausible scenario . . .'

Three years later they got him: by a radio-detonated bomb on a journey that was not only top secret but had been delayed. Who told the Mafia the precise time he would be travelling on that highway?