(ANSA) - ROME, DEC 18 - 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. (ANSA).