Mafia Blamed in 3rd Major Sicily Killing : Crime: The victim headed an anti-extortion squad in Catania. He was slain as plans were being made to deploy troops in the city.

In the third major slaying blamed on the Mafia in two months, gunmen Monday killed Giovanni Lizzio, the head of the police anti-extortion squad in Sicily’s second-largest city.

Lizzio, 46, who was married with two children, was shot in the chest, head and shoulders by at least two helmeted men on motorcycles as he was driving home in the evening, police said.

The killers in Catania, a steamy city at the base of volcanic Mt. Etna, opened fire on Lizzio when he stopped at a traffic light. He died en route to a hospital.

Police threw up roadblocks in the area, but the killers escaped.

“This is clearly a Mafia crime,” said Catania police chief Giuseppe Scavo. He added that Lizzio had been hearing testimony from a “repentant” Mafioso who decided to turn state’s evidence.

The killing of Lizzio, a leading authority on organized crime clans in the Catania area, was the third significant slaying by the Mafia in Sicily in just over two months.

Eight days earlier, top anti-Mafia judge Paolo Borsellino and his five bodyguards were blown apart by a massive car bomb when he arrived to visit his mother at an apartment block in Palermo.

On May 23, Italy’s best-known anti-Mafia judge, Giovanni Falcone, was killed along with his wife and three bodyguards as they were driving into Palermo on a highway near the airport.

Lizzio, a 20-year veteran, had headed the Catania anti-extortion division for two years and was making a dent in the Mafia’s protection rackets in the city.

A study by the merchants association Confcommercio earlier this year found that nearly 50% of the city’s businesses were forced to pay the Mafia a pizzo , or extortion money, to stay in business.

It is the highest rate in Italy, slightly higher than the rate in Palermo, the Sicilian capital.

Recently, however, businessmen throughout Sicily--particularly in the northern coastal cities of Capo d’Orlando and Sant’Agata di Militello--have rebelled and refused to pay extortion money to gangsters.

The best known, Libero Grassi, a leading Palermo textile manufacturer, was killed last year.

Lizzio was killed while top police officials in Catania were discussing how best to deploy army troops who have arrived in Sicily from the mainland to help fight the Mafia.

A week after Borsellino was killed, the government ordered 7,000 troops to the southern island. It is the biggest use of the armed forces against organized crime there in 40 years.