Italy’s most wanted mafia boss – who had been on the run since 1993 – has been arrested at a private hospital in the Sicilian capital of Palermo, police have said.
Prosecutors say Matteo Messina Denaro is a boss of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra mafia. The head of the Carabinieri police force’s special operations squad said that Messina Denaro was captured on Monday at the clinic where he was receiving treatment for an undisclosed medical condition.
Messina Denaro had been sentenced in absentia to a life term 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 bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan which killed 10 people the following year.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni hailed the arrest as “a great victory for the state that shows it never gives up in the face of the mafia”.
In August 2021, the Italian public TV broadcaster Rai released a recording dating back to March 1993 in which the voice of Messina Denaro was identified for the first time during a trial in which he was called to testify. After a few weeks, the boss fled and had not been found since.
Police said in September 2022 that Messina Denaro was still able to issue commands relating to the way the mafia was run in the area around the western Sicilian city of Trapani, his regional stronghold, despite his long disappearance.
Messina Denaro, who comes from the small town of Castelvetrano near Trapani, is accused by prosecutors of being solely or jointly responsible for numerous other murders in the 1990s.
In 1993 he is alleged to have helped organise the kidnapping of a 12-year-old boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, in an attempt to dissuade his father from giving evidence against the mafia, prosecutors say. The boy was held in captivity for two years before he was strangled and his body dissolved in acid.
A young man when he went into hiding, he is now 60. Messina Denaro, who had a power base in the port city of Trapani, in western Sicily, was considered Sicily’s Cosa Nostra top boss even while a fugitive.
Messina Denaro was the last of three longtime fugitive top-level mafia bosses who had for decades eluded capture. His arrest comes 30 years and a day after the capture of convicted “boss of bosses” Salvatore “Toto” Riina, in a Palermo apartment after 23 years on the run.
Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report
