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Matteo Messina Denaro (centre), leader of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, is escorted by the police after his arrest in Palermo
Photo: - / dpa
More and more details are emerging about the arrest of Italy's most wanted mafia boss.
Matteo Messina Denaro was wearing a watch worth around 35,000 euros when the investigators seized it.
He was apparently unarmed and dressed like a typical patient at the upscale clinic where he was reportedly being treated for cancer.
"He didn't fight back," Colonel Lucio Arcidiacono of the Carabinieri told reporters.
During a press conference in the evening, the authorities did not provide any information about his health.
Messina Denaro was a young man when he went into hiding and is now 60 years old.
With a power base near the western Sicilian port of Trapani, even on the run he was considered the supreme godfather of Sicily's Cosa Nostra.
He was the last of three longtime, high-ranking mafia bosses who managed to evade capture for decades.
Hundreds of police officers have been busy tracking him down over the years.
On Monday, in the pouring rain, Messina Denaro was led down the clinic's front steps to a waiting black van by two carabinieri, each holding an arm.
He wore a brown leather jacket trimmed with sheepskin, a matching white and brown peaked cap, and his signature tinted glasses.
His face looked pale and he was staring straight ahead.
Health status helped track him down
Palermo chief prosecutor Maurizio De Lucia told reporters that the fugitive used the pseudonym Andrea Bonafede and had an Italian identity card in that name.
He used the alias, whose surname means something like "good faith" in Italian, to book a morning appointment at the clinic.
The fugitive's health helped investigators track him down, says Carabinieri General Pasquale Angelosanto.
"It all led to today's appointment when he would have come to the clinic for some tests and treatments," he said.
Denaro was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia and was blamed for dozens of murders over the past several decades.
He was convicted, among other things, for carrying out two bombings in Sicily together with other Cosa Nostra bosses in 1992, which killed the two top anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, Falcone's wife and several of her bodyguards.
He was also convicted of the gruesome murder of a mafia traitor's young son, who was kidnapped and strangled to death before his body was dissolved in a vat of acid.
mgo/AP/Reuters