Deadly Italian Mafia boss, Matteo Messina Denaro, arrested after 30 years on the run

Italian police on Monday, announced the arrest of the country’s most wanted mafia boss, Matteo Messina Denaro, who had been on the run for over 30 years.

The police said Denaro 60, who was the boss of the Sicily Cosa Nostra mafia family, was arrested in a morning raid at a private hospital in the Sicilian capital Palermo, where he was receiving treatment for an undisclosed medical condition.

The Mafia honcho, according to local media, was sentenced in absentia to a life term for his role in the 1992 murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

He also faces a life sentence for his involvement in bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan the following year, which killed 10 people.

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Denaro who is from the southern Italian town of Castelvetrano near Trapani, is accused by prosecutors of being solely or jointly responsible for several other murders in the 1990s.

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.

The boy was held in captivity for two years before he was strangled and his body dissolved in acid, prosecutors say.

Police said as at September last year, Denaro was still able to issue commands relating to the way the Mafia was run in the area around the western Sicilian city of Trapani, his regional stronghold, despite his long disappearance.

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