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TURIN, Italy : A Mafia boss praised Silvio Berlusconi and boasted that the mob owed everything to political backers like Italy's current leader, a turncoat hitman told a court Friday.
Mob chief Giuseppe Graviano said Berlusconi and one of the future prime minister's allies, Senator Marcello Dell'Utri, had aided the gang, according to testimony from an ex-Mafia mobster.
The crime boss said he "got everything thanks to the reliability of these people," before giving the names of Berlusconi and Dell'Utri, the turncoat Gaspare Spatuzza told the Turin court at the long-awaited hearing.
Graviano said the Sicilian Mafia had "the country in their hands" thanks to the help they received, Spatuzza said.
The hitman, serving a life sentence for the murder of a priest who campaigned against the Mafia and a child, added Graviano was "happy like someone who had just won the lottery or had a baby."
The mobster's testimony, given from behind a screen and in a court under heavy police protection, came at the appeal hearing of Dell'Utri, who is challenging a nine-year jail sentence handed down for Mafia association.
Both Berlusconi and Dell'Utri have vehemently denied ties to the Mafia.
The premier on Friday denounced the trial as an "absurd plot" against him cooked up by the Mafia in a bid to damage the administration which had done most to fight it, according to government sources.
The alleged comments by Mafia boss Graviano came in 1994, the year after the mob launched attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan, which killed 10 people and injured dozens.
Spatuzza also repeated to the court a legal submission he made at the end of last year, stating that Berlusconi and Dell'Utri were trusted political contacts of Graviano at the time of the attacks.
The year after the attacks, in 1994, Berlusconi and Dell'Utri created the political party Forza Italia and Berlusconi was swept to power.
Spatuzza on Friday told the court the 1993 attacks were "abnormal" for the Mafia, as they were indiscriminate and not aimed at particular targets -- such as judges deemed a threat to the crime gang.
Berlusconi at the weekend rejected reports of his alleged Mafia links and insisted his government had made fighting the mob a priority.
His spokesman Paolo Bonaiuti echoed this Friday and hailed "the extraordinary results" of the authorities' fight against the Mafia.
"The government has arrested eight Mafia members a day... including 15 to 30 of the most dangerous Mafiosi on the run," he said.
Separately on Friday in Milan, a corruption trial in which Berlusconi is accused was adjourned until January 15, ANSA reported.
The court accepted that the premier could not attend the hearing as he was in a meeting of government ministers, the agency said.
The prime minister faces allegations that he paid his British former tax lawyer, David Mills, 600,000 dollars (400,000 euros) to give false evidence in two trials in the 1990s.
Mills, who was tried separately, was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in jail over the case in February.
- AFP /ls
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