The Police in Italy have arrested Matteo Messina Denaro described as the country’s most wanted mafia boss.
According to police, Messina Denaro, 60, has been on the run for 30 years and is a boss of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra mafia.
He was apprehended on Monday at a private hospital in Palermo, Sicily, where he was receiving treatment for an undisclosed ailment.
Prosecutors have charged the Mafia boss, who is from the small southern town of Castelvetrano near Trapani, with involvement in several other murders in the 1990s.
Prosecutors claim he assisted in the kidnapping of a 12-year-old boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, in 1993, in an attempt to dissuade his father from testifying against the mafia.
The boy was held in captivity for two years before he was strangled and his body dissolved in acid.
Reports indicated that Messina Denaro has 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 involvement in bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan the following year, which killed 10 people.
Messina Denaro faces multiple life sentences in prison.
He 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, according to the police.
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.
Messina Denaro was arrested 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.
John Dickie, a professor of Italian studies at University College London and an expert on the mafia, described Messina Denaro’s capture as “another signal of the decline of the Sicilian mafia”.
“He was the youngest member of a leadership group within the Sicilian mafia that took control of the Sicilian mafia in the early 1980s, essentially by massacring all their rivals, and then mounted a major attack on the Italian state,” Dickie told Al Jazeera from London.
“All of this was aimed at trying to get the state to back down from a major onslaught against organised crime that had been gaining momentum … [but] that onslaught has continued and Messina Denaro was the last of that leadership group still at large,” he added.
“[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.”
Discussion about this post