After three decades on the run, Italy’s most wanted mafia boss, Matteo Messina Denaro, 60, has been arrested, according to media reports. Police officers arrested the man on Monday at a health center in the Sicilian capital of Palermo, police general Pasquale Angelosanto told the Italian news agency AGI. The mafioso, who went into hiding in 1993, was sentenced to life in prison for murder in absentia and is seen as the successor to the historical ‘godfathers’ Bernardo Provenzano and Toto Riina, who died in prison in 2016 and 2017.
Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini confirmed the arrest. The “Super Boss” Denaro has been arrested, Salvini wrote in the Whatsapp messaging service. He was “deeply moved” and thanked “the women and men of the state who have never given up and uphold the rule that sooner or later even the greatest criminals are caught on the run”.
He did not use modern means of communication
Denaro was number one on the Italian Ministry of the Interior’s list of most wanted criminals. Since the turn of the millennium, detectives have been trying to isolate the now 60-year-old with the help of arrests in his area and seizures. This strategy is now successful.
In 2015, the researchers discovered, among other things, that Denaro, who was born near Trapani in western Sicily, did without modern means of communication in order to leave no traces. Instead, he used the age-old mafia method of “pizzini” – coded messages on a small piece of paper – to instruct his accomplices. The only known photo of the fugitive to date was from the early 1990s. (AFP/SDA)