ROME, Oct. 31 (Xinhua) -- Italy's former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was put under a fresh investigation in connection with mafia bomb attacks in the early 1990s, local media reported on Tuesday.
Prosecutors in Florence opened a probe after receiving wiretapped conversations of a jailed Sicilian mafia boss, who suggested the former prime minister might have ordered the attacks, La Repubblica newspaper cited judicial sources as saying.
If confirmed, it would be the third probe launched into the alleged involvement of the Italian media tycoon and center-right political leader in three car bombs that overall killed 10 people in Florence, Milan and Rome between May and July 1993. The two previous investigations were dropped due to a lack of evidence.
Former senator Marcello Dell'Utri, Berlusconi's long-time political advisor and co-founder of his Forza Italia (FI) party, was probed in the same investigation. Dell'Utri is already serving a seven-year sentence in jail for association with the mafia.
In a conversation with a prison inmate wiretapped by police in April 2016, life-sentenced boss Giuseppe Graviano hinted Berlusconi had urged him to carry out attacks against the state for his own political interests.
The bombings near the Uffizi Museum in Florence, in Milan, and in Rome had come under a wider strategy of confrontation with the Italian institutions. In fact, the Sicilian mafia carried out a series of shocking attacks against judges, police forces, and politicians between 1992 and 1993, including the killing of Italy's top anti-mafia prosecutors Giuseppe Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
Such violent campaign had aimed at forcing representatives of the Italian state to open a "dialogue" with the Sicilian mob and soften anti-mafia legislation, according to experts and findings gathered in trials.
As for the 1993 bomb attacks, they were more specifically considered as an act of revenge for the arrest of top mafia boss Toto Riina occurred in January that year.
Berlusconi's lawyer Niccolo Ghedini dismissed the new probe in a statement, Ansa news agency reported. "This is clearly the umpteenth investigation destined to be rapidly shelved, as it has happened with the previous ones, since there are no real new evidences," Ghedini said.
