Via D'Amelio bombing (1992)

On 19 July 1992, a car bomb killed Sicilian anti-mafia magistrate Paolo Borsellino and five members of his police escort — Agostino Catalano, Emanuela Loi, Vincenzo Li Muli, Walter Eddie Cosina, and Claudio Traina — on Via D'Amelio in Palermo, Sicily. The attack came 57 days after the Capaci bombing, in which Borsellino's friend and fellow anti-mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone had been killed along with his wife and police escort. Borsellino spent the afternoon at his summer residence outside Palermo before driving with his escort into the city at around 16:00 to visit his mother. At 16:58, a Fiat 126 loaded with approximately 100 kilograms of TNT exploded as Borsellino's car and one escort vehicle arrived on Via D'Amelio; a sixth escort officer, Antonino Vullo, survived in a third vehicle. Loi was the first woman assigned to an Italian judicial police escort and the first policewoman killed on duty. The standard practice of clearing parked cars from the street ahead of Borsellino's arrival had not been authorized by Palermo's municipal administration.

The bombing drew immediate public outrage. Protesters gathered outside Palermo's prefecture the following night, and mourners confronted officials at Borsellino's funeral. In the days afterward, Palermo's police commander and prefect were transferred, the city's chief prosecutor resigned, and roughly 7,000 soldiers were deployed to Sicily. Separately, the red notebook in which Borsellino recorded details of his investigations disappeared from the scene in the minutes after the explosion. Officials who were present that day have given conflicting accounts of what happened to it, and its fate has never been officially resolved.

Investigators arrested Vincenzo Scarantino in September 1992 on accusations of having stolen the car used in the bombing. At a first trial, concluded in January 1996, Scarantino was sentenced to 18 years in prison, and three co-defendants received life sentences; two of them were later acquitted on appeal. A second trial, which began after Scarantino changed his statements, ended with life sentences for several senior mafia figures, including Salvatore Riina and Giuseppe Graviano. A third trial in 2002 produced life sentences for more than a dozen additional mafia figures. Years later, a Mafia member who had become a state witness admitted to stealing the getaway car himself, and Scarantino acknowledged that his original testimony had been coerced by investigators; the case was reopened as a result.

In October 2020, mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro was sentenced to life imprisonment as one of the instigators of the bombing. He was captured in January 2023, and his sentence was confirmed on appeal that July.