Police said on Tuesday they had arrested seven people on Mafia charges, including a Roman Catholic priest accused of saying Masses for a top crime boss and presiding at a secret wedding of another crime figure.
Father Mario Frittitta, 58, a monk of the Carmelite religious order, was arrested on charges of aggravated aiding and abetting the Mafia.Frittitta, wearing brown robes, held his arrest warrant with his handcuffed hands as he left a police station in central Palermo. He had been ordered in for questioning when he was arrested.
He was accused of having said Mass last Christmas and Easter for Pietro Aglieri while the top boss and his bodyguards were living in a secret hideout in Bagheria, Sicily.
Aglieri was arrested last June. The boss, one of the top Mafia fugitives, was wanted for the car bomb killing of anti-Mafia judge Paolo Borsellino in Palermo in 1992.
When police first raised suspicions about Frittitta earlier this year, he admitted to having met Aglieri but said he had done so to give him spiritual help and to try to convince him to change his ways.
Aglieri headed a Mafia family known as the "Saint Mary of Jesus" clan, named after the Palermo neighborhood it controlled.
"He helped Aglieri when he was a fugitive by telling us that he did not know where Aglieri was," Sabella said. "He had contacts with Aglieri for at least six months."
The priest worked in a parish in the tough Kalsa neighborhood in the Sicilian capital.
Palermo Police Chief Antonio Manganelli thanked Sicilian church authorities, saying: "This shows that the Church is against the Mafia and every other criminal organization."
He did not elaborate on how the church may have cooperated with authorities.