Extradition proceedings against the 56-year-old Mafia boss Sebastiano Brunno can continue, Magistrate Aaron Bugeja ruled today.

Magistrate Bugeja said that despite errors in the description of some of the crimes committed by Brunno, the extradition proceedings as a whole are still valid. 

Brunno is subject to an extradition request over a mafia-related murder. Yesterday, his lawyers argued that this request should be nullified, since it was based on a sentence that has been cancelled.

Mr Brunno was arrested last month in a joint operation involving Maltese and Sicilian police. He was living in hiding in a St Paul's Bay apartment, using a false Italian ID that identified him as a 49-year-old man from Palermo.

Italian authorities believe him to be the current leader of the Nardo clan which is based in the Sicilian town of Lentini, which lies roughly halfway between Catania and Syracuse.

In 2009, Mr Brunno had been convicted in absentia of the 1992 murder of Nicolò Agnello, who was shot dead with a sawn-off shotgun, an apparent casualty of a bloody rivalry between the Nardo clan and the di Salvo clan based in the neighbouring town of Scordia. Italian authorities had included him in the list of the country's most dangerous fugitives.

Originally, Mr Brunno had also been convicted for a number of other crimes, and jailed for life with a year of solitary confinement. But the sentence was eventually revised with a number of charges dropped, and the period of solitary confinement was halved.

But the request, according to defence counsels Roberto Montalto and Michela Spiteri, was based on the original sentence: a sentence which, Dr Montalto argued, "no longer exists."