“It was not a personal, intimate choice,” she said.
Tina Montinaro, another widow of a victim in the 1992 bombing, also condemned Mr. Brusca’s release.
“We don’t know the truth about the massacres after 29 years, and Giovanni Brusca, the man who destroyed my family, is free,” Ms. Montinaro told the Adnkronos news agency.
Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right League party, wrote on Twitter, “This is not the ‘justice’ that Italians deserve.”
But Pietro Grasso, an Italian senator and a former magistrate who worked with Mr. Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, another prominent anti-mafia prosecutor who was murdered in Sicily in 1992, said that in Mr. Brusca’s case, the state “won not once, but three times.”
Authorities recorded a victory when they arrested him, he wrote on Facebook, “because he was and remains one of the worst criminals in our history for the number of crimes committed and for the brutality.”
The second victory was convincing him to collaborate and testify, and the third was when he was released because it was then that “a very powerful signal” was sent “to all the mafia mobsters in jail who will never have freedom again, if they do not collaborate,” Mr. Grasso said.
The law allowing for shortened sentences for informants who reveal information leading to significant arrests was passed in the 1990s. Intended by magistrates to eradicate the mafia, the legislation has had some successes, although they have often been met with public outrage.
