The most wanted mafia boss in Italy was captured by police after 30 years on the run.
Matteo Messina Denaro, according to the prosecutors, is a Cosa Nostra mafia boss in Sicily.
The arrest was made by police early on Monday morning at a private hospital in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, where the 60-year-old was receiving care for an undisclosed medical condition.
For his involvement in the murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone in 1992, Messina Denaro was given a life sentence in absentia.
He also faces a life sentence for his part in the bombings that occurred in Florence, Rome, and Milan the year after, which resulted in 10 fatalities.
Prosecutors are holding Messina Denaro, who is from the small southern town of Castelvetrano near Trapani, either solely or jointly accountable for a number of other murders that occurred in the 1990s.
Prosecutors claim that in 1993, he assisted in planning the kidnapping of 12-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo in an effort to stop his father from testifying against the mafia.
After being held in captivity for two years, the boy was strangled to death and his body was then dissolved in acid.
In spite of his protracted disappearance, police reported in September of last year that he was still in a position to provide orders regarding how the mafia was operated in the territory surrounding Trapani, a city in western Sicily that served as his regional stronghold.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni welcomed his arrest as a “great victory for the state”.
“The prevention [of] and fight against mafia crime … will continue to be an absolute priority of this government,” Meloni said in a post on Twitter.
Having gone into hiding as a young man, he is now 60 years old. He was the last of three top-level Mafia bosses who had been on the run for years, and hundreds of police officers had been tasked with tracking him down.
The arrest of Messina Denaro, according to mafia expert and University College London professor John Dickie, is “another signal of the decline of the Sicilian mafia.”
“[His arrest] is a very important symbolic gesture which shows that ultimately the state will win, and the state is winning in the case of the Sicilian mafia.”
Author-Roberta Appiah
