The Italian police arrested this Monday (16) Matteo Messina Denaro, number 1 of Cosa Nostra, a century-old criminal organization and most wanted mobster in the country. He had been on the run for three decades and was detained in a Sicilian hospital in Palermo.
The mafia boss was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders of two Italian prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, in 1992 and for his participation in bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan, episodes that culminated in ten deaths, the following year.
The police stated that Denaro, even though he was on the run, was still issuing commands for the mafia’s actions in the area around the city of Trapani, a stronghold under his control. He is accused by prosecutors of being responsible for several other murders in the 1990s in the country.
In 1993, he helped organize the kidnapping of a 12-year-old boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, to dissuade the boy’s father, a police informant, from testifying against the mafia, according to the prosecution’s arguments. Matteo was held captive for two years before he was strangled; his body was then dissolved with acid.
Italy’s Prime Minister Gioegia Meloni said the arrest of the mobster is proof that the state is not giving up the fight against the mafia. “Preventing and fighting mafia crime will remain an absolute priority for this government,” she wrote on Twitter.
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