FLORENCE -- Magistrates have opened a new investigation into whether former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and his former marketing manager Marcello Dell Utri ordered Mafia bombings in 1993 in Milan, Rome and the Uffizi Museum in Florence, judicial sources said Tuesday.

The new probe opened by an investigating judge in Florence, the third so far against the two men in the case, follows the recording of remarks by jailed Cosa Nostra boss Giuseppe Graviano telling a cellmate that the conservative politician asked for his services at the time. Graviano was convicted of involvement in the 1993 attacks including the one by the Uffizi Museum in which several people were killed.

The previous two investigations were shelved. An aide to Berlusconi suggested that the new investigation had an ulterior motive of damaging the showing of Berlusconi and his followers in weathervane elections being held in Sicily on Sunday.

Dell'Utri, a former senator, is serving a prison sentence following a conviction for external support of the Sicilian Mafia.

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