Giuseppe Dainotti, 67, was shot in the head as he cycled along a street in Palermo, in what police say is a warning that Cosa Nostra is far from beaten

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

A mafia boss has been gunned down while riding his bicycle in Sicily, in what appeared to have been the sort of mob killing that has become rarer in recent years as dangerous figures have been locked up.

Giuseppe Dainotti, 67, was shot in the head as he cycled along a street in Palermo, almost 25 years to the day since anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone was killed in a bomb blast on a motorway on the Italian island.

Photographs of Monday’s crime scene evoked decades of violence in the Sicilian capital, showing Dainotti’s body covered by a sheet, only his shoes on show, and the white bicycle he was riding lying where it fell.

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The Palermo prosecutor Francesco Lo Voi said the slaying was a warning to the state that Cosa Nostra (“Our Thing”) may have been lying low, but was far from beaten.

“When some people claim the mafia no longer exists or has been destroyed, something always happens to confirm it is still there,” he said.

“When necessary, it shoots again, in a clear and symbolic way,” he said.

Falcone’s murder in May 1992 and that of fellow magistrate Paolo Borsellino in a separate bombing in July the same year sparked a vast crackdown against the mafia that landed many of its key figures behind bars.

The once-powerful Sicilian mafia has largely been surpassed in recent years by the notoriously ruthless ’Ndrangheta in Calabria and the Naples-based Camorra.

The last high-profile murder saw a lawyer beaten to death by members of the organised crime group in 2010.

Witnesses who called the police after hearing the gunshots on Monday said they thought Dainotti, who was released from prison in 2014 after serving time for murder, was executed by two killers who pulled up alongside him on scooter.

“Such a murder, so heinous, carried out near a school, on the anniversary of the [Falcone;] massacre, shows how complex the mafia phenomenon is,” said Enzo Letizia, secretary of the national police officials association.

“Tomorrow the state will remember its heroes, slain by the mafia; today the mafia showed its dynamism, by killing once more,” he said.

The gangster is believed to be close friends with Salvatore Cancemi, a high-ranking mafia boss involved in the preparations and executions of the murders of Falcone and Borsellino.

In 1993 Cancemi turned himself in and became a police collaborator – describing among other things how the feared boss of bosses Toto Riina ordered French champagne to celebrate Falcone’s death – and died in hiding in 2011.

The slain Dainotti was nicknamed Gano di Magonza (Ganelon) by his enemies in a reference to the knight who betrayed Charlemagne’s army to the Muslims, according to Italian media reports.

The literary character, whose name derives from the Italian word inganno – fraud or deception – is condemned by Italy’s famed poet Dante to spend eternity among fellow traitors in the ninth circle of hell.