Police on Wednesday staged searches
of Palermo's Villa Sofia and Civico hospitals in relation to a
probe by prosecutors in the Sicilian city into the network of
people who helped the late Mafia boss during his 30 years on the
run.
Messina Denaro, 61, 'Cosa Nostra's last boss', died in September
2023 after being arrested in January last year while leaving a
clinic where he was being treated for cancer in Palermo.
Several people, including Messina Denaro's sister and a teacher
suspected of being his partner, had been convicted for allegedly
helping the mobster to evade capture and maintain relations with
his men while he was a fugitive.
Messina Denaro was 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
convicted of 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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