After hiding for thirty years, the Italian authorities in Palermo arrested the most wanted man among the Italian mafia, Matteo Messina Denaro, who hails from Sicily.
The General of the Italian Gendarmerie, Pasquale Angelo Santo, revealed to the Italian agency, “Aggi” today, that the Gendarmerie forces arrested the wanted man inside a health facility in Palermo, where he went to undergo clinical treatments.
Matteo Messina Denaro (60 years old) is considered the successor to the two main historical leaders of the Sicilian Mafia (“Cosa Nostra”), Toto Reina and Bernardo Provenzano, who died in prison in 2016 and 2017.
One of the most wanted
Matteo Messina Denaro, born in April 1962 near Trapani in Sicily, ranks first on the list of the Ministry of Interior’s six most wanted persons in hiding in Italy.
Denaro was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for the murder. However, the only known photograph of him dates back to the early 1990s.
Matteo Messina Denaro (AFP)
For several years, hundreds of police and gendarmes have been involved in the hunt for the most notorious Italian fugitive.
Since the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Italian police have multiplied arrests and confiscation of property in his vicinity, in an isolation strategy that took nearly 20 years to bear fruit, indicative of the size of the support network that surrounded him.
