Iran Press/ Europe: One of the world’s most wanted men and savage killers, and Italy’s No. 1 fugitive, the Sicilian Mafia godfather Matteo Messina Denaro, has been arrested, ending one of the longest manhunts in Europe.
Messina Denaro was arrested by the Carabinieri paramilitary police in Palermo, the Sicilian capital, on Monday morning, during his visit to a private health clinic for an unspecified illness, which police said was cancer.
He had been on the lam for 30 years and had been accused of dozens of murders, including complicity in two of the highest-profile murders in post-war Italian history – those of the Italian prosecuting magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.
The duo became marked men after their crackdown on the Sicilian Mafia – the Cosa Nostra – resulted in the so-called Maxi Trial in the late 1980s, which resulted in 475 Mafia indictments. In 1993, Mr. Messina Denaro was convicted in absentia for his role in their deaths.
Among other grisly crimes Messina Denaro was convicted of is the murder of a Mafia turncoat’s young son, Giuseppe Di Matteo, who was strangled and his body dissolved in a vat of acid.
In 2002, Mr. Messina Denaro was convicted in absentia and handed a life sentence for his role in bomb attacks in Florence, Rome, and Milan that killed 10 people in 1993, including the bombing of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, which killed five people and destroyed paintings by Giotto and Rubens.
His whereabouts became an obsession for Sicilian police and state prosecutors, some of whom thought they were close at times to capturing the man – only to see his trail vanish.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy right-wing party, called his arrest “a great victory for the state.”
The details about the capture of Mr. Denaro, 60, were not immediately known, though the police may have been tipped off about his disguises, and it is now known that he had been visiting the oncology clinic using a false name for a year or so.
The Carabinieri took him to a secret location immediately after his arrest, Italian media reported.
Mr. Denaro tried to escape but, once surrounded by the carabinieri, did not put up a fight and came clean about his identify. “What’s your name?” the police asked him. “I’m Matteo Messina Denaro,” he replied, according to the Italian news agency ANSA.
His list of alleged crimes is long, obscene, and shocking. “With all the people I have killed, you could fill a graveyard,” is the line attributed to him by Pentiti – state witnesses who provide evidence in exchange for lighter sentences.
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