Italy’s No. 1 fugitive, Matteo Messina Denaro, a convicted mafia boss who ordered some of the nation’s most heinous killings, was arrested Monday at a private clinic in Sicily after three decades on the run, Italian paramilitary police said.
Messina Denaro was captured at the Palermo clinic where he was receiving treatment for an undisclosed medical condition, according to Carabinieri Gen. Pasquale Angelosanto, who heads the police force’s special operations squad.
A young man when he went into hiding, Messina Denaro is now 60. With a power base near the western Sicilian port city of Trapani, he was considered Sicily’s Cosa Nostra top boss even as a fugitive.
He was the last of three longtime top-level Mafia bosses who managed to elude capture for decades. Hundreds of police officers were tasked over the years with tracking him down.
Euronews Correspondent Giorgia Orlandi spoke to a mafia attack survivor and the President of Caponnetto Foundation, Giuseppe Antoci, about the significance of Denaro’s arrest.
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