Italy’s most wanted mafia gangster Matteo Messina Denaro arrested after 30 years on the run in Sicily

Italy’s most wanted mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro has been arrested in his native Sicily after 30 years on the run.

Italian police raided and arrested a private hospital in the Sicilian capital of Palermo, where Denaro was being treated by an unknown doctor.

Denaro was sentenced to life in absentia for his role in the 1992 murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

He also faces life in prison for his role in bombings in Florence, Rome and Milan, which killed ten people the following year.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni hailed the arrest as “a great victory for the state which shows that it never gives up on the mafia”.

Even as a fugitive, Messina Denaro, who had a power base in western Sicily, was considered the supreme boss of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra.

Police said in September 2022 that despite his long disappearance, Messina Denaro was still able to issue arrest warrants against the way the Mafia was run in the area around the western Sicilian city of Trapani, its regional stronghold.

Messina Denaro, from the town of Castelvetrano, near Trapani, is accused by prosecutors of being solely or partially responsible for numerous other murders in the 1990s.

Denaro hasn’t been seen in public since the early 1990s, but a new E-Fit was created in 2014 with the help of another whistleblower.

Wanted for a series of crimes, he was convicted in absentia by a judge in 1993 of involvement in the 1993 bombings that killed 10 people in Rome, Florence and Milan.

In 1993, he helped organize the kidnapping of a 12-year-old boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, to keep his father from testifying against the Mafia, prosecutors say.

The boy was held captive for two years before he was strangled and his body dissolved in acid.

Denaro also used a five-year-old girl to exchange secret handwritten messages between him and other Mafia top dogs.

Denaro used the young daughter of mob whistleblower Attilio Fogazza to write the memos.

Fogazza, himself charged with murder, said in 2016 that Denaro’s deputy, Domenico “Mimmo” Scimonelli, reached out to his daughter to broadcast the messages.

The right hand got his daughter an ice cream cone and put the groceries in her jacket and backpack.

The daughter and the rest of Fogazza’s family are living under police protection at an undisclosed location while he works with prosecutors trying to bring down the “boss of bosses” in the Italian mafia.

Fogazza owned a car dealership in south-west Sicily and decided to team up with Palermo detectives after he was arrested last December for the 2009 murder of Salvatore Lombardo, who was killed after driving a Scimonelli van stole

“My daughter said one day that ‘Uncle Mimmo’ took her to an ice cream shop and put the messages in her jacket and backpack,” Fogazza said, according to Italian media reports from the prosecutor’s office in Palermo.

This is breaking news, more to come…