Judge Accused of Mafia Ties Kills Himself : Italy: Jurist’s death stuns officials on a day when an aggressive police campaign brings major arrests in Sicily and southern Italy.

A senior prosecuting magistrate in the government’s war against the Mafia committed suicide in Palermo on Thursday, two days after learning that an informer had accused him of links with organized crime.

The death of Judge Domenico Signorino, 48, stunned government officials on a day when an aggressive police campaign against organized crime notched major new arrests in both Sicily and mainland southern Italy.

Detectives in Palermo said that Signorino went to work normally in the Sicilian capital on Thursday but left soon afterward to return to his apartment. There, he shot himself, leaving a note to his wife in which he denied any involvement with the Mafia.

Signorino helped prosecute more than 400 accused Mafia members in the mid-1980s and was a key aide of chief anti-Mafia Judge Giovanni Falcone, who was murdered by the Mafia last June.

On Monday, Italian newspaper reports said that Gaspare Mutolo, a Mafia drug peddler turned informant, had accused Signorino of links to mobsters in Sicily.

Speaking with reporters that day, Signorino, who, like all high-risk magistrates in Sicily, lived under constant tension and 24-hour protection, dismissed the accusation as a fabrication.

The informer Mutolo is serving a 17-year sentence that Signorino asked for as prosecuting magistrate.

Signorino, who had spent nearly 20 years prosecuting mob figures and had won life sentences against a score of Mafia leaders, was described by colleagues as “very upset” by the accusation against him.

A lawyer and the owner of a transport company were also suicide victims in Sicily in the last week after being accused by informers of links to the Mafia.

Informers, called pentiti , have fueled a wave of major roundups in recent months in Sicily and southern Italy.

Thursday morning, police armed with 96 warrants fanned out across the Caltanisetta region in central Sicily. They arrested scores of alleged Mafia members they accuse of dozens of Sicilian mob killings in recent years.

In the Calabrian city of Palmi on the southern tip of the Italian mainland, prosecutors indicted 126 people Thursday in a probe that links politicians, mobsters and business people in an industrial development fraud.

Calabria, home to a deeply rooted criminal organization known as the ‘Ndrangheta, has been convulsed in recent days by arrests in the murder in 1989 of Ludovico Ligato, a former chairman of Italy’s state railroads.

Eleven Calabrians have been arrested in the Ligato case this week, two of them former Christian Democratic deputies in Parliament.

Italian newspapers said police are also prepared to charge two Socialist members of Parliament in the case and are asking parliamentary authorities to lift their immunity.

The Ligato case is seen by prosecutors as a landmark because it shows a direct, commanding role by politicians in underworld organization.

Linked with the murder is another investigation of conspiracy between politicians and mobsters in bribery, theft and payoffs in public works contracts.