Italy’s most-wanted mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro arrested in Sicily

Italian police have arrested the nation’s most-wanted Sicilian mafia boss, ending a 30-year hunt for a gangster convicted in absentia of the 1992 murders of Italy’s two most well-known anti-mafia prosecutors, and of different crimes.

Matteo Messina Denaro, 60, was the final of the technology of highly effective bosses of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the legal organisation that terrorised Sicily within the late Eighties and early Nineteen Nineties. The gang additionally confirmed its attain and energy throughout Italy with lethal terror bombings in Rome, Florence and Milan in 1993 — for which Messina Denaro was additionally convicted in absentia and sentenced to life in jail.

The mafioso — who was extensively alleged to have fled overseas, undergone cosmetic surgery to have modified his face, and even died in secrecy — was captured on Monday morning at a personal medical clinic within the Sicilian metropolis of Palermo, a longtime mafia stronghold, and centre of the legal group’s enterprise actions.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who rushed to Palermo after the arrest to satisfy the law enforcement officials concerned, hailed the seize of the longtime Sicilian fugitive as “an amazing victory for the state that doesn’t surrender within the face of the mafia”.

Police stated Messina Denaro, whose capability to evade arrest made him an emblem of the resilience of the Cosa Nostra whilst its precise energy and clout light, didn’t resist arrest. Residents of Palermo gathered on the streets and clapped to hail his seize.

“I didn’t suppose I’d ever get up to this information,” stated Anna Sergi, a College of Essex sociologist, who grew up in Calabria — the stronghold of the ‘Ndrangheta mafia — and is now an skilled on organised crime in Italy.

“Messina Denaro is such a mythological determine,” she stated. “So long as the boss is unattainable, and nobody can catch him, it implies that the Costra Nostra spark continues to be alive. This looks like closure to most individuals in Italy.”

Messina Denaro was a disciple and deputy of the Cosa Nostra’s strongest twentieth century boss, Salvatore “Totò” Riina, who was arrested 30 years in the past, and died in jail in 2017.

Messina Denaro, head of the Trapani clan, was a member of Cosa Nostra’s “Cupola” ruling council and, together with fellow mafioso Bernardo Provenzano — who was captured in 2006, took over day-to-day operating of the Cosa Nostra after Riina’s arrest.

The arrested fugitive has been convicted — and obtained life sentences for — a number of homicides, together with the automobile bombings that killed Italy’s most outstanding anti-mafia prosecuting judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, which devastated Italians and symbolised the ability and attain of the mafia.

Messina Denaro was additionally convicted — and sentenced to life in jail — in reference to the kidnapping of Giuseppe Di Matteo, the 12-year-old son of a mafioso who started co-operating with the police after his arrest.

Mafia members held the boy captive for greater than two years in an try to silence his father, then lastly killed him and dissolved his physique in acid, in accordance with prosecutors once they charged folks in reference to the crime.

Further reporting by Giuliana Ricozzi in Rome