Monitoring Desk
ROME: Italian anti-mafia police arrested fugitive Sicilian boss Matteo Messina Denaro on Monday, ending a long 30-year search for Italy’s most wanted criminal.
A former trigger man who once reportedly said he could “fill a cemetery” from his victims, the sixty-year-old Denaro is believed to have become the “boss of bosses” after the death of Salvatore “The Beast” Riina in November last year.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni noted that Messina Denaro was the most dangerous mafia boss. He said Denaro’s arrest in his native Sicily was a huge victory for the state in its war against organized crime.
Messina Denaro was nabbed in Palermo
The criminal was nabbed “inside a sanitary structure in Palermo, where he had gone for receiving treatment,” special operations commander Pasquale Angelosanto narrated in a video statement released by the Italian police.
Messina Denaro had been number one on the most-wanted list of Italy, but there was only one known picture of him dated back to the early 1990s.
Denaro is suspected of having been behind the 1993 bombings in Florence, Rome, and Milan that killed ten people, just months after Cosa Nostra murdered anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in similar attacks.
In 2015, police discovered Denaro was communicating with his closest collaborators through the Pizzini system, where tiny, folded paper notes were left behind under a rock at a farm in his native Sicily.
