In a historic judgment seemingly destined to have profound political implications, a Palermo court on Saturday absolved the seven times Italian prime minister Mr Giulio Andreotti of the charges of "Mafia association".
Somewhat predictably, Italy's so-called "trial of the century" ended with the acquittal of Senator Andreotti, a Christian Democrat who, in one form or another, served in Italian governments from 1947 to 1992, almost without interruption.
Saturday's acquittal comes one month after a court in Perugia had absolved Senator Andreotti of involvement in the 1978 murder of a journalist, Mino Pecorelli. The prosecution in Palermo had asked for a 15-year sentence for Senator Andreotti, accused of having systematically afforded political protection to Cosa Nostra throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Heavily based on the evidence of ex-mafiosi turned state's witness, the prosecution's case made much of the fact that Senator Andreotti's closest political ally in Sicily had been a former MEP, Mr Salvo Lima, a man assassinated by the Mafia in March 1992 and someone known to have had close links with organised crime in Sicily.
A succession of ex-mafiosi accused Senator Andreotti of various degrees of collusion with the Mafia, with one of them, Balduccio di Maggio, claiming to have witnessed a September 1988 meeting in Palermo between Andreotti and the "boss of bosses", Toto Riina, during which the two men allegedly exchanged a Mafia-style kiss.
"The media called this the Trial of the Century but rather than call it that, it should now be termed the Injustice of the Century," commented a lawyer, Ms Giulia Bongiorno, a member of Senator Andreotti's defence team, immediately after the acquittal was announced on Saturday morning.
Under investigation since 1992, Senator Andreotti himself informed the media in March 1993 that he was to be charged with Mafia-related crimes. Two years later, in September 1995, the "trial of the century" opened in Palermo. Over the last four years, the Palermo court has held 252 sittings, has heard 350 witnesses (including 27 ex-mafiosi) and has amassed an imposing 800,000-page book of evidence. The sheer quantity of the documentation generated by the trial plus, of course, the awesome political responsibility attached to the verdict prompted the three court judges to spend fully 10 days locked up in their chambers before issuing Saturday's verdict.
Throughout the last seven years, 80-year-old Senator Andreotti has maintained a quiet dignity throughout his judicial ordeal, claiming that he was the victim of a vendetta, especially from the Mafia, keen to avenge itself for the tough anti-Mafia legislation introduced by some of his governments. On Saturday he maintained his calm, telling reporters:
"I always had faith in the judges . . . I have never said that this trial was the result of a plot against me but certainly someone must have suggested something to these people [ex-mafiosi] . . . and suggested it badly since some of them didn't even know their lines in court . . .
"My biggest worry, given that I am of a certain age, was that I would not live long enough to hear the final verdict."
The verdict was greeted with approval by former Christian Democrats, by the centre-right opposition and by the Vatican alike. The opposition leader, Mr Silvio Berlusconi, called the trial a "judicial monstrosity", a former Christian Democrat president, Mr Francesco Cossiga, deemed it an "ignoble farce" while the senior Vatican spokesman, Dr Joaquin Navarro-Valls, expressed the Vatican's "satisfaction".
Mr Cossiga even went so far as to call for the banning "from all public office" of Judge Giancarlo Caselli, chief State Attorney in Palermo from January 1993 until May of this year. In the face of such criticism, the two senior Palermo prosecutors who conducted the case against Senator Andreotti, Guido Lo Forte and Roberto Scarpinato, both claimed that "as magistrates and citizens", they had "done their duty".
Saturday's judgment seems certain to have profound repercussions both with regard to the use of "state's witnesses" in the fight against the Mafia and with regard to the ongoing public debate about the powers of Italy's investigative magistracy, a debate close to the heart of Mr Berlusconi, who has already received three corruption convictions.
When the reasoning behind the judges' verdict is made public (probably in 90 days' time), it may well emerge that the prosecution's case against Senator Andreotti failed because it confused his political and moral responsibilities with criminal and penal responsibilities, a point underlined in a comment piece in yesterday's Rome daily La Repubblica.
"Pre-1992 Italy was not ruled by criminals but by politicians who . . . in order to maintain themselves in power . . . [condoned] a significant amount of collusion with organised crime. The most eminent of these politicians was Giulio Andreotti."