Italian police snatch fugitive Mafia boss

Italian police arrested one of Italy's 30 most wanted Mafia bosses after tracking him down in West Africa, the interior ministry said yesterday.

Giovanni Bonomo, identified by Interior Minister Guiseppe Pisanu as a "major figure" in the Sicilian Mafia, had been on the run for seven years before Italian police and secret services caught up with him in Senegal.

He was expelled and arrested on arrival at Rome airport. Awaiting the 68-year-old in Italy is an 11-year prison sentence for Mafia crimes which was handed down at a trial in his absence.

Bonomo, the financial brains behind the Partinico clan near Palermo, fled to Africa in the 1990s.

Magistrates say he continued his Mafia activities from South Africa and Namibia before moving to Senegal, where the Italian secret service tracked him down with the help of Interpol.

"You see. We even catch fugitives outside Italy," said Palermo's chief prosecutor Pietro Grasso. "We don't give up."

In recent months, police have been closing in on Bernardo Provenzano, the suspected top Mafia boss who has been on the run for 40 years.

Earlier this month they raided a private clinic in Sicily where the boss was suspected of have received health care.