Matteo Messina Denaro, “the skinny one”, was wanted for his role in the murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.
| Italy’s most wanted mafia boss, Matteo Messina Denaro, was arrested by armed police at a private hospital in Sicily, where the man who has been on the run since 1993 was being treated for cancer.
“We had a clue to the investigation and followed it through to today’s arrest,” Palermo prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia said.Magistrate Paolo Guido, who was also in charge of investigations into Messina Denaro, said dismantling his network of protectors was key in reaching the result following years of work.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni travelled to Sicily to congratulate police chiefs after the arrest. “We have not won the war, we have not defeated the mafia, but this battle was a key battle to win, and it is a heavy blow to organised crime,” she said.“It proves that mafiosi, despite their delusions of omnipotence, are ultimately doomed to defeat in the conflict with the democratic state,” she said.
In 1993 he helped organise the kidnapping of a 12-year-old boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, in an attempt to dissuade his father from giving evidence against the mafia, prosecutors say. The boy was held in captivity for two years before he was strangled and his body dissolved in acid.The arrest comes almost 30 years to the day since police arrested Salvatore “Toto” Riina, the Sicilian Mafia’s most powerful boss of the 20th century.
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