By Alvise Armellini
ROME – Failing well being, greater than the rest, is what delivered to an finish 30 years of life as a fugitive for Matteo Messina Denaro, Italy’s most needed man till his arrest on Monday.
Messina Denaro, 60, was caught simply exterior a personal clinic in Palermo along with an confederate. Judicial sources stated the mobster was an everyday customer there after a most cancers operation final yr.
Sickness “is without doubt one of the occasions within the lifetime of a (fugitive) person that forces them to come back out into the open,” Palermo Prosecutor Paolo Guido informed a press convention.
After receiving a tip that he was sick, police honed in on Messina Denaro, hunting down different potential suspects of an analogous age and situation, partly by checking the database of the nationwide well being system.
Investigative work was “unrelenting, fixed and incremental”, Common Pasquale Angelosanto of the Carabinieri police ROS particular forces stated.
He added that over time Carabinieri police had arrested greater than 100 alleged accomplices of Messina Denaro – together with his sister and different members of the family – and seized property price round 150 million euros ($162 million), crucially undermining his help community.
Ultimately, the person generally known as ‘U Siccu’ (the thin one) or ‘Diabolik’ (an Italian comics character) provided no resistance and didn't attempt to escape, Palermo Chief Prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia stated.
“We caught a really harmful fugitive with out having to make use of violence, we didn’t even have to make use of handcuffs,” he stated.
Officers discovered a person who seemed well-groomed, in obvious good well being, with a luxurious watch price 35,000 euros ($37,840). In police photos, Messina Denaro was seen carrying a brown fur-lined jacket, glasses and a brown and white woolly hat.
Despite the fact that police and magistrates didn't know what Messina Denaro seemed like – other than computer-generated pictures that relied on decades-old pictures – it was instantly clear that they arrested the precise man.
“ him, there was little that wanted to be confirmed, he was who we had been anticipating to seek out,” stated Colonel Lucio Arcidiacono, one other particular forces chief of the Carabinieri police.
Chief Prosecutor de Lucia stated Messina Denaro spent his life hiding in varied components of Italy, however most lately stayed in his residence province of Trapani, in western Sicily, and within the island’s regional capital Palermo.
Questions stay on the extent to which political and different institution connections allowed the mobster to flee justice for therefore lengthy, with de Lucia calling his presumed white collar enablers “Mafia bourgeoisie”.
“There are ongoing investigations on this,” he stated.
In the meantime, Messina Denaro appears set for a life behind bars.
Convicted in absentia for an extended checklist of murders, together with of a teenage boy whose physique was dissolved in acid, the cancer-stricken mobster is match sufficient to serve time in jail, prosecutors insisted.
“He will probably be actually handled and sorted, as is the precise of any Italian citizen – in a jail,” Guido stated.
($1 = 0.9250 euros)
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