He had two judges killed: life imprisonment for mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro

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An Italian court has sentenced mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro (61), who has been in hiding for decades, to life imprisonment for the murder of two judges in the 1990s. As reported by Italian media, the Caltanissetta jury in Sicily on Wednesday confirmed a verdict imposed in absentia on Messina Denaro in 2020 – at that time the head of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra was still on the run.

In May 1992, a massive explosion shook a highway near Palermo. The explosion was so strong that the National Institute of Geophysics, which normally monitors Mount Etna, recorded the quake. Judge Giovanni Falcone, who specializes in Mafia cases, killed his wife and three companions in the attack. Two months later, judge Paolo Borsellino was killed in a bomb attack along with five members of his escort.

Matteo Messina Denaro was on the run for 30 years

The two attacks shocked the country and numerous police officers then spent decades trying to track down the alleged mastermind Messina Denaro in Sicily. But it wasn’t until January that Italy’s most wanted mafia boss was arrested at a private clinic in Palermo after 30 years on the run. He had been treated there under an assumed name. Since his arrest, he has been held in a high-security prison in Abruzzo, east of Rome.

Messina Denaro was considered the successor to “godfathers” Bernardo Provenzano and Totò Riin, who died in prison in 2017 and 2016. In addition to the murders of anti-mafia judges Falcone and Borsellino, he is also accused of involvement in mafia attacks in Rome, Milan and Florence in 1993, which killed a total of ten people. After these attacks, Messina Denaro went into hiding. (AFP)

Source: Blick