Detained Italian mafia boss transferred to maximum security prison

By Ahmet Gencturk

ANKARA (AA) - Italian mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, who was arrested on Monday after 30 years on the run, has been transferred to a maximum-security prison in central L'Aquila province, the state-run ANSA news agency reported on Tuesday.

The facility is equipped for the tough 41-bis jail regime that mafia convicts are subjected to, a provision allowing suspension of certain prison regulations.

The choice is said to be logical as the prison is close to a good oncology center in the L’Aquila hospital.

The 60-year-old was held at a clinic in Palermo where he had been undergoing treatment for cancer for over a year.

Denaro will unlikely ever return to his native Sicily, police sources told the agency.

He had been condemned to life in prison in absentia for involvement in dozens of murders, including the 1992 bombings that killed anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, 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 in Milan, Florence and Rome in 1993.