Meloni wants national day for 'mafia fighters'

(ANSA) - ROME, JAN 16 - Premier Giorgia Meloni visited Palermo on Monday, when Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro was arrested after 30 years on the run in the Sicilian city, and said she wanted January 16 to become a national day dedicated to the people who combat organized crime.
    'We are used to remembering, above all, those who make the ultimate sacrifice in the fight against the mafia," Meloni told reporters.
    "But there are people who sacrifice their entire existence to achieve these goals.
    "I would like today to be the day on which the work of these men and women is celebrated.
    "It is a proposal I will make - a day of celebration for us to tell our children that the mafia can be beaten".
    She said Monday was a "historic" day but stressed that the mafia has not been defeated yet.
    "We have not won the war," she said.
    "But this was a fundamental battle to win and it is a big blow to organised crime".
    Meloni added that her government would take action to ensure that people do not turn to the Mafia because the State fails to provide answers to their problems.
    Referring to people like those in Palermo who applauded when Messina Denaro was arrested at a private clinic on Monday, she she "they will not be left alone.
    "The message is to continue to believe that the State can give better answers, that the State is there, it will take care of them, we will do our best so that they will never have to find themselves in the situation of despair of having to do something they never want to do," she said.
    "But they must also have the alternative and we must build the alternative, we must do everything we can, because that is the most effective tool in the fight against the cancer of the mafia".
    The premier also held a minute's silence on Monday at the site of the Capaci bombing, the Cosa Nostra attack in which anti-mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone was killed along with his wife and three police bodyguards in May 1992.
    Falcone's friend and colleague Paolo Borsellino was killed in another mafia bombing along with five members of his security detail two months later. (ANSA).