Palermo prosecutors said Wednesday that the silence that enabled late Cosa Nostra boss Matteo Messina Denaro to remain a fugitive to Italian justice for 30 years is still continuing many months after his death.
"Like a thick fog, total silence shrouds everything that existed around his figure, his contacts, his movements, and therelationships he weaved during his many years in hiding," the Palermo Public Prosecutor's Office led by Maurizio de Lucia said after three more people suspected of being part of the network that aided the Cosa Nostra head were arrested.
The three were an architect and a Mazara del Vallo hospital radiology technician, who are accused of mafia association, and a third person accused of external involvement in mafia association.
It takes the number of people arrested for allegedly helping themobster since his capture of him on January 16, 2023, up to 14, including four who have been convicted.
Messina Denaro was caught while leaving a clinic where he was being treated for cancer in Palermo.
He died in a hospital in L'Aquila on September 25 aged 62.
Messina Denaro had been 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-oldson 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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