March 28, 2024, 06:45
3 min read
PALERMO – “Disconcerting context”, the prosecutors define it. The healthcare world remains under observation. The arrest of the radiology technician Cosimo Leone from the Abele Ajello hospital in Mazara del Vallo is only one indicator of the investigative work.
There is a “circuit that is gradually being revealed, despite the almost total silence that even today – the prosecutors write – a few months after the death of the mafia boss, it envelops like a very thick fog everything that has existed around his figure, his contacts, to his movements and the relationships he established during the long years of clandestineness”.
We are not only talking about the silences of those in Campobello di Mazara, but also in Palermo, who saw and met the fugitive. According to the Palermo prosecutors, “this is a transversal silence which in fact, at present, has precluded having spontaneous news even apparently insignificant”. So the lunge: “No doctor, healthcare worker or even simple secretarial employee who has had contact with Messina Denaro Matteo has decided to volunteer to report to the judicial authority or the judicial police that they have dealt with the fugitive in any capacity or in any case reveal what they have learned directly, or even indirectly, about the care given to the important mafia leader”.
He passed himself off as the surveyor Andrea Bonafede. Many may have fallen for it, but just as many knew his real identity. The network of loyalists headed by the Bonafede family also had, and above all, “branches in public health”.
On November 3, Messina Denaro underwent treatment in a private practice, in Marsalato a colonoscopy which revealed the presence of cancer. From there everything changed, he decided that he had to become Andrea Bonafede to access hospitals. The temporal progression raises suspicions in a land like Sicily which often does not shine for the speed of the health response: on the 6th he managed to be examined by a surgeon from the Mazara del Vallo hospital (Andrea Bonafede, the municipal worker, accompanied him), on the 9th November he was already hospitalized (the general practitioner Alfonso Tumbarello, however, the day before the visit in hospital had already prepared the request for hospitalization), on the 10th he had the CT scan (in reality it had initially been scheduled for the 20th, but brought forward).
Who arranged or requested the advance of the diagnostic test of which there is a trace in the handwritten notes in a diary found in the hospital? Leone certainly made a shift change. It was in the afternoon but he had himself set up in the morning to attend the CT scan. News of the outcome filtered out thanks to Leone’s phone calls. After the operation and discharge he changed hospitals. On 9 December Bonafede accompanied the fugitive to Trapani for a visit to the Sant’Antonio Abate hospital where the oncologist FIlippo Zerilli was waiting for them. He served the CT disk. Leone went to the hospital in Mazara del Vallo to collect it.
“The picture of connivance in favor of the fugitiveoutside and inside healthcare facilities – writes the judge for preliminary investigations Alfredo Montalto – is taking on alarming dimensions and will require further investigations which will be carried out in a context which until now, as already mentioned in the introduction, has not shown any collaborative spirit”.
Published on
March 28, 2024, 06:45
