A bewildered nine-year-old in Sicily has been given the highest-possible security cover with a 24-hour armed guard and anti-bomb surveillance, after a notorious Cosa Nostra boss decided that the boy’s father – a magistrate who sent him to prison – “and all his spawn” should be obliterated.

The mobster who ordered the family to be killed is considered “one of the most bloodthirsty” in all of Sicily, according to Italian press reports. The prosecuting magistrate earned the mob boss’s wrath by foiling a plan he had to pose as a turncoat in order to avoid jail. In reality the mobster continued to manage his criminal activity and even organise a vicious vendetta against a nephew who he felt had usurped his position in the clan.

Ordering the assassination of the prosecutor, the mob boss is reported to have said: “You have to do it no matter who he’s with, and if his male child is there, all the better. His spawn shouldn’t survive, either.”

The boy’s mother and his 12-year-old sister are also considered to be at “very high risk”, by the interior ministry’s National Committee for Order and Public Security, which has provided a 24-hour armed guard and anti-bomb surveillance in the all the places they visit regularly. The plan to kill the magistrate and his family was revealed by several informers, at least one of whom is considered a reliable source.

The danger was confirmed by wire-tapped conversations between the boss and family members which referred to an attack that was currently in preparation.

Earlier this year, the suspect is said to have returned to an earlier abode to kick out his ex-wife and two children, telling them: “Get lost or I’ll slit your throats like lambs.”

Whatever the “code of honour” mobsters claim they abide by, it certainly doesn’t prevent the killing of children. This was brutally demonstrated by the deliberate (and separate) killings of two toddlers, Nicola Campolongo and Domenico Petruzzelli, in Calabria and Puglia respectively, in the first few months of 2014.

The leading Mafia writer, Corrado De Rosa, said that these killings amounted to the “umpteenth demonstration that a Mafia code of honour does not exist”.

“People often say that bosses don’t touch women or children. It’s not true,” he said.

A statement by ANM, the Italian magistrates association, said that the new danger to the magistrate and his family in Sicily showed “the daily commitment and sacrifice” made by its members.