Matteo Messina Denaro, a frontrunner inside Sicily’s Cosa Nostra mafia, has been linked to a string of murders.
Italian police have arrested the nation’s most needed mafia boss, who had been on the run for 30 years.
Prosecutors say Matteo Messina Denaro is a boss of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra mafia.
Police on Monday morning swooped in on a personal hospital within the Sicilian capital Palermo, the place the 60-year-old was receiving therapy for an undisclosed medical situation, to make the arrest.
Messina Denaro has been sentenced in absentia to a life time period for his position within the 1992 murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
He additionally faces a life sentence for his involvement in bomb assaults in Florence, Rome and Milan the next yr, which killed 10 folks.
Messina Denaro, who comes from the small southern city of Castelvetrano close to Trapani, is accused by prosecutors of being solely or collectively liable for a number of different murders within the Nineteen Nineties.
In 1993, he helped organise the kidnapping of a 12-year-old boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, in an try and dissuade his father from giving proof towards the mafia, prosecutors say. The boy was held in captivity for 2 years earlier than he was strangled and his physique dissolved in acid.
Police mentioned in September final yr that he was nonetheless capable of subject instructions regarding the way in which the mafia was run within the space across the western Sicilian metropolis of Trapani, his regional stronghold, regardless of his lengthy disappearance.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni welcomed his arrest as a “nice victory for the state”.
“The prevention [of] and struggle towards mafia crime … will proceed to be an absolute precedence of this authorities,” Meloni mentioned in a publish on Twitter.
The arrest Monday got here 30 years and a day after the seize of convicted “boss of bosses” Salvatore “Toto” Riina, in a Palermo condominium after 23 years on the run.
John Dickie, a professor of Italian research at College Faculty London and an professional on the mafia, described Messina Denaro’s seize as “one other sign of the decline of the Sicilian mafia”.
“He was the youngest member of a management group inside the Sicilian mafia that took management of the Sicilian mafia within the early Nineteen Eighties, primarily by massacring all their rivals, after which mounted a serious assault on the Italian state,” Dickie informed Al Jazeera from London.
“All of this was aimed toward making an attempt to get the state to again down from a serious onslaught towards organised crime that had been gaining momentum … [but] that onslaught has continued and Messina Denaro was the final of that management group nonetheless at massive,” he added.
“[His arrest] is a vital symbolic gesture which reveals that in the end the state will win, and the state is profitable within the case of the Sicilian mafia.”
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