Italy’s most wanted mafia boss who had been on the run for three decades has been arrested at a private hospital in the Sicilian capital of Palermo, police have said.

A Mafia boss, accused of dozens of murders, has been arrested after spending 30 years on the run.

The Sicilian Cosa Nostra Mafia's don Matteo Messina Denaro was arrested today by the Italian carabinieri in Ros after three decades as a fugitive.

Denaro has been sentenced in absentia to a life term for his role in the 1992 murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. 

He also faces a life sentence for his role in bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan which killed 10 people the following year.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni hailed the arrest as 'a great victory for the state that shows it never gives up in the face of the mafia'.

Even while a fugitive, Messina Denaro, who had a power base in western Sicily, was considered Sicily's Cosa Nostra top boss. 

Police said in September 2022 that Messina Denaro was still able to issue commands relating to the way the mafia was run in the area around the western Sicilian city of Trapani, his regional stronghold, despite his long disappearance.

Messina Denaro, who comes from the small town of Castelvetrano near Trapani, is accused by prosecutors of being solely or jointly responsible for numerous other murders in the 1990s. 

Denaro has not been seen in public since the early 90s, but a new e-fit was created in 2014 with the help of another informant. 

He is wanted for a string of offences, and a judge found him guilty in his absence in 1993 for his part in the bomb attacks that killed 10 people in Rome, Florence and Milan.

In 1993 he helped organise the kidnapping of a 12-year-old boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, in an attempt to dissuade his father from giving evidence against the mafia, prosecutors say. 

The boy was held in captivity for two years before he was strangled and his body dissolved in acid.

Denaro also used a five-year-old girl to run secret handwritten messages between himself and other mafia top dogs.

Denaro used mafia informant Attilio Fogazza's young daughter to run the memos.   

Fogazza, who himself is on a murder charge, said in 2016 that Denaro's second-in-command Domenico 'Mimmo' Scimonelli approached his daughter to send the messages.

The right-hand man had taken his daughter for an ice cream and put the messages inside her jacket and backpack. 

The daughter and the rest of Fogazza's family have been living in a secret location under police protection while he co-operates with the prosecutors as they attempt to bring down the 'boss of bosses' in the Italian mafia scene.    

Fogazza ran a car dealership in south-western Sicily and decided to collaborate with Palermo investigators after he was arrested last December for the murder of Salvatore Lombardo in 2009 who was killed after he stole a van from Scimonelli.

'One day my daughter said 'Uncle Mimmo' had taken her for a gelato and put the messages inside her jacket and her backpack,' Fogazza told prosecutors in Palermo according to Italian media reports.