The head of the Sicilian mafia, Matteo Messina Denaro, captured in January after three decades on the run, is in a coma in the hospital and is no longer receiving food, Italian media reported today.
Messina Denaro, 61, has been suffering from colon cancer for several years and decided to undergo treatment at a clinic in Palermo, the Sicilian capital, where he was arrested last January.
Facing numerous life sentences, he was held in a high-security prison in L’Aquila, where he reportedly continued treatment in his cell.
But in early August, Messina Denaro was transferred to the inmate ward of the local hospital, where his condition worsened in recent days.
He is now in an “irreversible coma”, according to the media, which claim that the doctors stopped feeding him and that he asked that he not be revived in the event of death, as reported by the AFP news agency.
Messina Denaro was for many years a leading figure in Cosa Nostra, the real-life Sicilian crime syndicate depicted in the Godfather films.
He was also one of the most ruthless, sentenced to life in prison six times, including for his role in the murder of anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone in 1992.
He was also convicted of participating in a series of deadly attacks in Rome, Florence and Milan in 1993, and of the kidnapping and subsequent murder of the 12-year-old son of a witness in the Falcone case.
Messina Denaro disappeared in the summer of 1993 and went on to top the list of Italy’s most wanted people.
In the following years there was much speculation about his whereabouts: it was eventually discovered that he had been near his hometown, Castelvetrano, in western Sicily.
Investigators had been searching for possible hiding places in the Sicilian countryside for years, intercepting members of his family and friends.
Hearing about an anonymous person’s medical problems with cancer and eye problems, detectives concluded it was Messina Denaro.
They used a national health system database to find male patients of the appropriate age and medical history, and eventually closed the case.
But although his arrest brought some relief to his victims, the mafia boss always maintained his silence.
In interviews in custody since his arrest, Messina Denaro went so far as to deny that he was a member of Cosa Nostra.
Source: Ambito
