Italy arrests Sicilian mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro after 30 years on the run.

ROME — Italy’s No. 1 fugitive, convicted mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, was arrested Monday at a private clinic in Palermo, Sicily, after 30 years on the run, Italian paramilitary police said.

Messina Denaro was captured at a clinic where he was being treated for an unknown illness, said Carabinieri General Pasquale Angelosanto, who heads the police’s special operations unit.

Messina Denaro was taken by police to a secret location immediately after her arrest, Italian state television reported.

The young man is now 60 when he went into hiding. Messina Denaro, who had a power base in the port city of Trapani in western Sicily, was considered the main boss of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, even when he was on the run.

He was the last of three longtime top-level fugitive mob bosses who had eluded capture for decades.

Messina Denaro, who was tried in absentia and found guilty of dozens of murders, faces multiple life sentences.

He is to be imprisoned for two bombings in Sicily in 1992 that killed the chief anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Among other horrific crimes for which he was convicted was the murder of the young son of a mafia renegade, who was strangled and his body dissolved in a vat of acid.

Monday’s arrest comes 30 years and a day after convicted “boss of bosses” Salvatore “Toto” Riina was caught in a Palermo apartment after 23 years on the run.

© 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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