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.
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