Panel Says Italy’s Andreotti Must Face Inquiry

ROME — Seven-time Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, Italy’s best-known politician, must face magistrates in Sicily investigating allegations that he was a political point man for the Mafia, a Senate committee ruled Tuesday.

In an 11-1 vote with 11 abstentions, the 23-member committee approved the magistrates’ request to lift Andreotti’s parliamentary immunity and allow judicial inquiries to continue.

“The vote is not a conviction. We agreed that the Palermo magistrates were acting responsibly,” committee member Antonio Franchi told Italian reporters. Next week, the full Senate is expected to ratify the committee decision.

The 74-year-old Andreotti, a pillar of Italian government for nearly half a century and now a senator-for-life, is said by Mafia informers to have been the pivotal contact in Rome for organized-crime bosses.

While Andreotti once again protested his innocence Tuesday, Italian political life was trying to turn over a new leaf. The Bank of Italy’s governor, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, named prime minister-designate Monday, spent Tuesday at home with a secretary and a telephone assembling a Cabinet.

Chief priorities of a Ciampi government will be to win parliamentary approval for electoral reform demanded by voters and to schedule national elections for this fall. Ciampi may announce the new government as early as today.

Three Mafia turncoats, whose testimony has been instrumental in the capture and jailing of hundreds of Mafiosi, have recently told judges in Palermo that Andreotti, while not a Mafioso, was the Mafia’s fixer in Rome at least from 1978 until 1992.

The informers say that Andreotti met Mafia bosses in Sicily more than once. At one meeting, he is alleged to have been greeted with a ritual fraternal kiss by boss of bosses Salvatore Riina, who was captured last January.