The head of the Italian mafia Cosa Nostra, Matteo Messina Denaro, died this morning of colon cancer at the age of 61, according to the Italian press, eight months after he was arrested after thirty years on the run.
According to information from the newspaper Corriere Della Sera, Messina Denaro was in the ward of the San Salvatore Hospital in L’Aquila.
His health condition deteriorated a month ago, after two operations, and in addition to anesthesia several days ago, family visits were suspended, Italian state television Rai reported.
Messina Denaro became head of Cosa Nostra after the arrests of Salvatore “Totó” Riina in 1993 and Bernardo Provenzano in 2006.
The mafia leader was arrested by Italian authorities on January 16, after thirty years on the run. He was accused of being the instigator of several murders and massacres that characterized Italy for decades.
Messina Denaro was arrested when he went to a private health center in Palermo for medical treatment. He was held in a maximum security prison in L’Aquila, in the central region of Abruzzo.
After the arrest, several houses were discovered in which the mafia boss had been hiding in recent years, in Campobello di Mazara, a few kilometers from Castelvetrano, his birthplace and where his family lives.
Matteo Messina Denaro, wanted since the 1990s, managed to remain hidden thanks to a network of contacts and assistance that guaranteed his escape all these years.
Messina Denaro faced multiple life sentences for his involvement in dozens of murders, including that of anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992 and that of Giuseppe Di Matteo, the 12-year-old son of a statehood gangster. witness and who was strangled and dissolved in acid in 1996.
Source: DN
