Italy’s collaborator law questioned after release of Giovanni Brusca

Magistrates and jurists agree that without the now controversial law Giovanni Brusca wouldn't have spent a day in prison

At 5.57 pm on 23 May 1992, a car carrying the Sicilian mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone was thrown into the air as a powerful explosion ripped a 15-metre crater in the motorway connecting Palermo to its airport. On a hillside overlooking the devastation stood one of the mafia's most notorious killers, Giovanni Brusca, nicknamed u scannacristiani (the people-slayer), who milliseconds earlier had detonated the 300 kilos of explosive placed in a culvert under the road. He killed Falcone, his wife, Francesca Morvillo, and three escorting officers.

Brusca, 64, believed to have murdered more than 100 people before he broke the oath of omerta and turned police informant, was released after 25 years in prison last week, thanks to a law championed by Falcone.