Rome/Milan
CNN
—
Matteo Messina Denaro, one of the supervisors of the Cosa Nostra Mafia in Sicily and Italy's most needed man, has been captured by police while being treated in a confidential wellbeing facility in Palermo, examiner Maurizio de Lucia said Monday.
He had been an outlaw beginning around 1993 and was considered by Europol perhaps of the most needed man in Europe, de Lucia told CNN.
“It is a triumph for all the police powers that have cooperated over these long years to deal with the risky outlaw,” Italy's head of Police, Lamberto Giannini, said in a proclamation praising the Carabinieri – Italy's tactical police – and the Palermo Public Examiner's Office.
Italian Top state leader Giorgia Meloni tweeted: “An extraordinary triumph for the state, which shows that it doesn't surrender in that frame of mind of the Mafia.”
Safeguard Clergyman Guido Crosetto referred to the capture as “an indication of an express that successes against Mafia.”
Talking outside the investigator's office, Meloni expressed that while Italy had not yet won the “battle” against the Mafia, this was a “fight that was crucial to win.”
