Main Mafia boss Messina Denaro has been arrested in Sicily
2023.01.16 08:00
Main Mafia boss Messina Denaro has been arrested in Sicily
By Kristina Sobol
Budrigannews.com – Matteo Messina Denaro, the most wanted mafia boss in Italy who had been on the run for three decades, was apprehended by Italian police on Monday after they stormed a private hospital in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, where he had been seeking treatment.
Messina Denaro, according to the prosecution, heads the Cosa Nostra mafia in Sicily.
For his part in the murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, he was given a life sentence in absentia.
He also faces a life sentence for his role in the bombings that killed ten people in Milan, Florence, and Rome the following year.
“A great victory for the state that shows it never gives up in the face of the mafia,” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said of the arrest.
In September 2022, police said that despite his long disappearance, Messina Denaro could still issue commands about how the mafia was run in the area around the western Sicilian city of Trapani, which was his regional stronghold.
Prosecutors accuse Messina Denaro, who is from Castelvetrano, a small town near Trapani, of being solely or jointly responsible for numerous other murders in the 1990s.
Prosecutors claim that he participated in the 1993 kidnapping of Giuseppe Di Matteo, a 12-year-old boy, to prevent his father from testifying against the mafia. Before the boy was strangled and his body dissolved in acid, he was held captive for two years.
