Messina Denaro's return to jail 'no longer on agenda'

(ANSA) - ROME, SEP 12 - Taking Matteo Messina Denaro back to L'Aquila's maximum-security prison is "no longer on the agenda" after the cancer-suffering mafia boss's condition deteriorated.
    sources said on Tuesday.
    Messina Denaro had been in hospital for over a month.
    The intestinal surgery he underwent on August 8 was successful but the mobster's advanced colon cancer has caused an overall deterioration in his state of health, the sources said.
    He has been in a special cell in a ward for inmates at L'Aquila's San Salvatore hospital for a week, having previously been in intensive care.
    The 61-year-old goes between moments in which he is lucid and even cheerful to others of extreme weakness, the sources said.
    He slipped into a coma for a spell a few days due to the effect of pain-killers and his medicines had to be changed, the sources said.
    Messina Denaro was caught in mid-January at a Palermo cancer clinic after 30 years on the run.
    The Cosa Nostra superboss has been convicted for his involvement in dozens of murders, including the 1992 bombings that killed anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
    In addition to the Falcone and Borsellino assassinations, he has been condemned for 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 at art and religious sites in Milan, Florence and Rome that killed 10 people and hurt 40 more in 1993. (ANSA).