ROME: Italian anti-mafia police arrested on the run sicilian godfather Matteo Messina Denaro on Monday, ending a 30-year manhunt for Italy’s most wanted gangster.
A former trigger man who once boasted he could ‘fill a graveyard’ with his victims, Denaro, 60, is said to have become the ‘boss of bosses’ after Salvatore’s death.The beastRiina in November 2022.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said Messina Denaro was the “most important” mafia boss and his arrest in his native Sicily was a “great victory” for the state in its war against organized crime.
The gangster was arrested “inside a health facility in Palermo, where he had gone for therapeutic treatment,” special operations commander Pasquale Angelosanto said in a video statement released by police.
Messina Denaro was number one on Italy’s most wanted list, but the only known photo of him was in the early 1990s.
He is believed to have been behind the 1993 bombings in Rome, Milan and Florence that killed 10 people, just months after Cosa Nostra murdered anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in similar attacks.
In 2015, police discovered he was communicating with his closest associates through the pizzini system, where tiny folded paper notes were left under a rock on a farm in Sicily.
A former trigger man who once boasted he could ‘fill a graveyard’ with his victims, Denaro, 60, is said to have become the ‘boss of bosses’ after Salvatore’s death.The beastRiina in November 2022.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said Messina Denaro was the “most important” mafia boss and his arrest in his native Sicily was a “great victory” for the state in its war against organized crime.
The gangster was arrested “inside a health facility in Palermo, where he had gone for therapeutic treatment,” special operations commander Pasquale Angelosanto said in a video statement released by police.
Messina Denaro was number one on Italy’s most wanted list, but the only known photo of him was in the early 1990s.
He is believed to have been behind the 1993 bombings in Rome, Milan and Florence that killed 10 people, just months after Cosa Nostra murdered anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in similar attacks.
In 2015, police discovered he was communicating with his closest associates through the pizzini system, where tiny folded paper notes were left under a rock on a farm in Sicily.
