Matteo Messina Denaro: Italian mafia boss arrested in Sicily | Crime Information

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 wished 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 12 months, which killed 10 individuals.

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 Nineties.

In 1993, he helped organise the kidnapping of a 12-year-old boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, in an try to 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 stated in September final 12 months that he was nonetheless in a position to challenge instructions referring to the best way 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 battle towards mafia crime … will proceed to be an absolute precedence of this authorities,” Meloni stated 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 house after 23 years on the run.