Italian police said on Monday they had arrested Matteo Messina Denaro, the country’s most wanted mafia boss who had been on the run for three decades, in a private hospital in the Sicilian capital of Palermo, where he had gone to a treatment.
Prosecutors say Messina Denaro is head of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra mafia.
He was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for his role in the 1992 murders of anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
He also faces a life sentence for his role in bombings in Florence, Rome and Milan that killed 10 people the following year.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni hailed the arrest as “a great victory for the state, which shows that it never gives up in the face of the mafia”.
Police said in September 2022 that Messina Denaro was still capable of issuing commands related to how the mafia was run in the area around the Sicilian city of Trapani, its regional stronghold, despite its long disappearance.
Messina Denaro, who hails from the small town of Castelvetrano, near Trapani, is accused by prosecutors of being solely or jointly responsible for several other murders in the 1990s.
In 1993, he helped organize the kidnapping of a 12-year-old boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, in an attempt to dissuade his father from testifying against the mafia, prosecutors say.
The boy was held captive for two years before he was strangled and his body dissolved in acid.
Source: CNN Brasil
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