One-time top Cosa Nostra fugitive
Matteo Messina Denaro was buried in the cemetery of his home
town of Castelvetrano, in Sicily, amid tight security early on
Wednesday.
The mobster died in a hospital in L'Aquila on Monday aged 62.
A number of Messina Denaro's relatives, including his daughter
Lorenza, his sisters Bice and Giovanna and his brother
Salvatore, were present at the burial.
The last godfather of the Sicilian mafia spent 30 years on the
run before being caught in a Palermo cancer clinic on January
16.
The superboss, who was diagnosed with colon cancer while in
hiding in late 2020, had been in San Salvatore hospital since
August 8 following a deterioration in his condition.
Before that Messina Denaro had been held at L'Aquila's
maximum-security prison under the tough 41 bis since January 17,
the day after he was arrested in the Sicilian regional capital.
On Friday, he went into an irreversible coma and doctors
treating him decided to withdraw his clinical nutrition on the
basis of his living will rejecting dysthanasia. Messina Denaro
had been convicted for his involvement in dozens of murders,
including the 1992 Cosa Nostra bombings that killed anti-Mafia
magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
In addition to the Falcone and Borsellino assassinations, he was
condemned for the killing of Giuseppe Di Matteo, the 12-year-old
son of a mobster-turned-State witness who was strangled and
dissolved in acid in 1996, and bombings at art and religious
sites in Milan, Florence and Rome that killed 10 people and hurt
40 more in 1993.
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