Mafia terrorist campaign feared

A BOMB attack in Rome has raised fears that the Sicilian Mafia may have initiated a terrorist campaign of unprecedented scale on the Italian mainland to undermine the authority of the state.

An anti-Mafia prosecutor has joined the team of investigators of the car bomb that destroyed the front of an apartment block in the comfortable residential area of Parioli.

Pietro Saviotti is a member of the national anti-Mafia team set up by the late judge Giovanni Falcone, the country's leading anti-Mafia campaigner, killed by a car bomb on 23 May last year.

The national police chief, Vincenzo Parisi, said on radio that he thought it was the same kind of attack as the car bomb that killed Falcone, and another one a month later that killed his colleague, Paolo Borsellino.

'This is a coincidence which makes us think,' he said. 'It comes when the government, the magistrates, the forces of order have a record of great successes against organised crime.' But he did not reveal whether there was concrete evidence that the Mafia had planted the bomb.

After the attack, the Italian authorities increased security at airports and embassies. Various Serb and Croat groups took responsibility for the bomb, as did a little-known group called the Armed Phalange. Middle Eastern groups have also mounted terrorist attacks in Rome recently.

One possible target was the television chat show host, Maurizio Costanzo, whose car passed 10 seconds before the Fiat packed with explosives blew a huge crater in the road.

Italian state television later reported that explosives had been found at a theatre in the small southern Sicilian town of Vittoria, where leading jurist Giovanni Galloni was among 180 people attending a conference.

If the Mafia was behind the car bomb, it would represent a dangerous development. The last time the Mafia was implicated in bombings on the mainland was in 1984. Then, 16 people died when a bomb exploded in a train between Florence and Bologna.

That attack bore the hallmarks of right-wing terrorists promoting the so-called strategy of tension. And that, according to the courts, was the intention. However, it was all a guise. A court convicted Mafia paymaster Pippo Calo and members of the Neapolitan Camorra of planting the bomb to divert police attention from organised crime.