PALMERO, Sicily -- Police Thursday discovered the bullet-riddled bodies of eight men in a stable next to a slaughterhouse, victims of what state-run television called the worst Mafia mass slaying in Sicily's history.
Alerted by an anonymous telephone call, police found the bodies at a stable run by gangsters in Palermo's most notorious Mafia-controlled slum around 7 a.m.
The stable complex, housing horses used in illegal races, is set behind iron gates in an open lot known as Cortile Macello (Slaughterhouse Courtyard), named for a nearby slaughterhouse.
Police and Italian reporters immediately dubbed the mass slaying the Slaughterhouse Courtyard massacre.
The state-run television network said it was the bloodiest mass killing in the history of Palermo, a city notorious for Mafia crime and the scene of a gang war for control of the multi-million dollar drug traffic between Sicily and the United States.
At least 550 people, mostly reputed Mafia gangsters, have been killed in Palermo since 1980.
By late Thursday police had not established a clear picture of what happened at the stable.
National police chief Giuseppe Porpora, heading a team of six investigators, said either the men were shot with pistols and shotguns while at a meeting with crime figures or a violent quarrel broke out among the members of just one gang.
At least seven of the eight victims had police records, but only for routine crimes such as theft and possession of weapons. None of the victims were major Mafia figures, police said.
Police feared the massacre could be part of the flare-up in Mafia violence stemming from the crackdown launched by police Oct. 6 on the basis of information provided by former Palermo Mafia boss Tommaso Buscetta.
'Buscetta's testimony has made clear to us that a massacre of this size is not possible on the orders of a local Mafia boss,' investigating Judge Giovanni Falcone told reporters. 'To shoot down eight people, they need the agreement of the Mafia commission.'
The 'commission' Falcone referred to is the supreme authority of the Mafia in Sicily.
Police records showed the number of dead in Thursday's massacre topped the seven policemen killed by a Mafia car bomb in June, 1963, previously the bloodiest single mass slaying in the Sicilian capital since World War II.
In terms of number of deaths, the latest incident matched the slaying of eight suspected criminals at Torre Annunziata near Naples on Sept. 26.
