Italian police have arrested the country’s most-wanted Sicilian mafia boss, ending a 30-year hunt for a gangster convicted in absentia of the 1992 murders of Italy’s two most famous anti-mafia prosecutors, and of other crimes.

Matteo Messina Denaro, 60, was the last of the generation of powerful bosses of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the criminal organisation that terrorised Sicily in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The gang also showed its reach and power across Italy with deadly terror bombings in Rome, Florence and Milan in 1993 — for which Messina Denaro was also convicted in absentia and sentenced to life in prison.

The mafioso — who was widely speculated to have fled abroad, undergone plastic surgery to have changed his face, or even died in secrecy — was captured on Monday morning at a private medical clinic in the Sicilian city of Palermo, a longtime mafia stronghold, and centre of its business activities.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who rushed to Palermo after the arrest, hailed the capture of the fugitive as an important strike against organised crime.

“It is a day of celebration for us,” Meloni said, after visiting the Palermo prosecutor’s office, which has long been at the heart of Italy’s anti-mafia investigations. “We can tell our children that the mafia can be beaten. We haven’t won the war, and we haven’t defeated the mafia but this was an important battle.”

For three decades, Messina Denaro’s ability to evade arrest — even as his associates were captured — made him a symbol of the resilience of the Cosa Nostra, even though the Mafia’s real strength has waned, overshadowed by the Calabria-based criminal organisation, the ‘Ndrangheta. Yet when finally caught, Messina Denaro did not resist and residents of Palermo gathered on the streets to hail his arrest.

“I didn’t think I would ever wake up to this news,” said Anna Sergi, a University of Essex sociologist, who grew up in Calabria and is now an expert on organised crime in Italy.

“Messina Denaro is such a mythological figure,” she said. “As long as the boss is unattainable, and no one can catch him, it means that the Cosa Nostra spark is still alive. This feels like closure to most people in Italy.”

Messina Denaro was a disciple of the Cosa Nostra’s most powerful 20th century boss, Salvatore “Totò” Riina, who was arrested 30 years ago and died in prison in 2017.

The head of the Trapani clan, he sat on the Cosa Nostra’s “Cupola,” or ruling council, and, along with fellow mafioso Bernardo Provenzano — who was captured in 2006 — took over day-to-day running of the Cosa Nostra after Riina’s arrest.

Messina Denaro has been convicted — and received life sentences for — multiple homicides, including the car bombings that killed Italy’s most prominent anti-mafia prosecuting judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992 — murders that traumatised Italians already doubtful of the state’s capacity to keep them safe.

The longtime fugitive was also convicted — and sentenced to life in prison — in connection with the kidnapping and gruesome murder of Giuseppe Di Matteo, the 12-year-old son of a mafioso who began co-operating with the police after his arrest. Mafia members held the boy captive for more than two years in an attempt to silence his father before killing him.

The Sicilian Mafia’s power has been significantly eroded since the days when it dominated the international drugs trade, although it remains an influential force in Sicily, one of Italy’s least developed regions. But Sergi said Messina Denaro’s arrest would pose new problems for the organisation.

“It’s very unlikely that he was dictating strategy, but he had a role in keeping the identity of the Cosa Nostra alive,” she added. “He was the symbolic gatekeeper, the glue of the organisation. Unless someone can have the same charisma, the same power of aggregation, it’s unlikely that the Cosa Nostra can come out of this untouched.”

Additional reporting by Giuliana Ricozzi in Rome