Italy's Carabinieri police have arrested Matteo Messina Denaro, the country's most wanted mafia boss, ending a 30-year manhunt for the notorious mobster, local media reported on Monday.
A former trigger man who once reportedly boasted he could "fill a cemetery" with his victims, the 60-year-old Messina Denaro is believed to have become the mafia's "boss of bosses" following the death of Salvatore "The Beast" Riina in November 2017.
Messina Denaro was detained at a private clinic in Palermo, where he was undergoing treatment for an unspecified illness, the Carabinieri's commander Pasquale Angelosanto told reporters.
A photograph released by police showed Messina Denaro in the back seat of a vehicle, wearing a cream hat, sunglasses and a brown leather jacket with a cream sheepskin lining.
Before that, the only known photo of him dated back to the early 1990s. He had been on the run since 1993.
Messina Denaro was the last of three longtime fugitive top-level Mafia bosses who had for decades eluded capture.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said his arrest in his native Sicily was a "great victory" for the state in its war against organised crime.
The mafia boss has been 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 role in bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan, which killed 10 people the following year.
In 2015, investigators discovered that he was communicating with his closest collaborators via the pizzini system, whereby tiny, folded paper notes were left under a rock at a farm in Sicily.
Police said in September 2022 that he was still able to issue commands in the area around the western Sicilian city of Trapani, his regional stronghold, despite his long disappearance.
(FRANCE 24 with Reuters)
