The Italian police on Monday arrested maybe the nation’s most needed fugitive, Matteo Messina Denaro, a mafia boss who had eluded the authorities for 3 a long time and was convicted in absentia of homicide and different crimes.
Mr. Messina Denaro, 60, was arrested in a hospital in Palermo, in his native Sicily, the place he was present process remedy, Pasquale Angelosanto, a normal with the Italian nationwide police, mentioned in an announcement.
The Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, congratulated the police and prosecutors for the arrest of the “most vital consultant of mafia syndicates,” calling it a “nice victory for the state that reveals it by no means offers up within the face of the mafia.”
President Sergio Mattarella of Italy, whose brother, Piersanti Mattarella, was murdered by the mafia in 1980 whereas serving as Sicily’s governor, phoned the police and prosecutors on Monday to congratulate them on the arrest.
Mr. Messina Denaro was thought of the inheritor to Salvatore Riina, the “boss of bosses” who was answerable for a collection of brutal killings of Italian prosecutors and law enforcement officials within the Nineties. Mr. Riina was captured in 1993, additionally in Palermo, and spent the remainder of his life in jail. He died in 2017.
Mr. Messina Denaro is believed to have maintained energy even whereas in hiding. He was sentenced to a life time period in absentia for his function within the 1992 murders of two anti-mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and bombings in 1993 in Florence, Milan and Rome that left 10 individuals lifeless.
Prosecutors say that he was additionally concerned within the 1993 kidnapping of a 12-year-old boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, to strain his father to cease revealing mafia secrets and techniques to the authorities. The boy’s stays had been later discovered dissolved in acid.
Mr. Messina Denaro is believed to have been concerned in dozens of murders within the Nineties, together with the strangulation of a pregnant girl whose companion was seen as a risk to his clan, and had been killed days earlier.
The police had tried a number of occasions to apprehend Mr. Messina Denaro after he went underground in June 1993, however a community of collaborators in Sicily, particularly within the western Trapani area, helped him evade arrest.
Video footage of Mr. Messina Denaro’s detention confirmed bystanders outdoors the non-public clinic in northern Palermo applauding law enforcement officials, their faces obscured by hoods, as he was taken away by automobile.
