“The man arrested at a restaurant in The Hague last Wednesday is not the person Italy is looking for,” the Public Prosecution Department said. in a statement on Saturday.
According to Mark L’s lawyer, Mr Van Cleef, an Italian police officer saw a photograph of his client and concluded it was the fugitive Mr Messina Denaro. The Italian authorities then informed the Dutch authorities, who arrested Mark L with a European arrest warrant issued by the Italian authorities.
But, he added, “there is no resemblance between a photograph of Denaro known to public sources and a recent photograph of my client.” He continued: “They don’t even know if Denaro is alive, he has had facial surgery.”
Italian media reports suggested that prosecutors in the northern Italian city of Trento pursued the case, and did not consult investigators in the Sicilian city of Palermo, who have long been pursuing Messina Denaro.
However, Italy’s chief anti-Mafia prosecutor, Federico Cafiero di Raho, defended the authorities in Trento, without going into the details of the case. “He did the right thing,” he said in a statement.
The prosecutor’s office in Trento did not respond to a request for comment.
The identity and whereabouts of Mr Messina Denaro is known as the “boss of all bosses” since his disappearance from his hometown in western Sicily in 1993. Investigators believe that he no longer lives in Sicily, but travels throughout Europe, where he is. There have been frequent but unfounded incidents of robbery.