Italy confirms Messina Denaro’s life sentence for the murder of the judges

Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were killed by the mafia

Italy’s Caltanissetta Court of Appeal upheld on Wednesday (19) the sentence of mafia leader Matteo Messina Denaro, 61, to life in prison for the explosions that killed anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

The sentence comes on the exact day of the 31st anniversary of the Cosa Nostra attack against Borsellino, which took place on July 19, 1992, in Palermo, and which also killed five agents of the magistrate’s escort. Falcone was assassinated by the mafia on May 23 of the same year, together with his wife, Francesca Morvillo, and three agents of his escort.

Messina Denaro was convicted in the first instance in 2020 as the architect of the attacks, which have become a milestone in the fight against the mafia in Italy. In the second degree trial, the panel presided over by judge Maria Carmela Giannazzo accepted the request of the Public Prosecutor’s Office to maintain the life sentence.

There is still an appeal to the Supreme Court. The leader of Cosa Nostra, imprisoned since January in the maximum security penitentiary of L’Aquila, after almost 30 years on the run, did not want to participate in the videoconference hearing to listen to the sentence.

According to the indictment, Messina Denaro would have been one of those responsible for the beginning of the Cosa Nostra “era of massacres”, with the attacks in the main Italian cities in the early 1990s, including those that killed Falcone and Borsellino, symbols of the fight against the mafia…

The criminal had been on the run since 1993 and was considered the “boss of bosses” of the Cosa Nostra, but was captured last January in a Palermo hospital where he was undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer. .

Source: Terra

Rose

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