More than 30 mafia suspects arrested over Germany killings
September 1, 2007 - 0:0
ROME (AFP) -- Italian police on Thursday rounded up dozens of suspected members of a notorious mafia family whose internal feuding has been blamed for the murders of six Italian men in Germany two weeks ago.
Thirty-three people were arrested in the raids including three hiding in a bunker, said the head of the operation, Colonel Antonio Fiano of the paramilitary Carabinieri police.The police sweep followed the issue of 44 arrest warrants by prosecutors in the southern region of Calabria, home of the 'Ndrangheta crime family.
Italian authorities believe a bloody vendetta between two rival 'Ndrangheta clans -- the Nirta-Strangio and the Vottari-Pelle -- was at the root of the murder on August 14 of the six Italians in the western German city of Duisburg.
Those targeted by the warrants included two brothers of the Duisburg victims and the boss of one of the feuding clans whose wife was shot dead on Christmas Day, 2006.
Italian authorities believe her killing was the spark for the Duisburg murders as well as several other attacks in Calabria.
Some 350 Carabinieri and 150 local police were involved in the raids in the small town of San Luca, and eight women were among those arrested, Fiano said.
The operation began at dawn and was still continuing in the afternoon. Two helicopters were watching from above and the town was surrounded to prevent anyone escaping.
The warrants served were for offences ranging from murder, gun trafficking and criminal association.
""It is a strong and necessary response launched by the state in San Luca to break the inter-clan mafia vendetta of the 'Ndrangheta which has already sown so much terror,"" Interior Minister Giuliano Amato said in a statement.
The police action came the day after Germany's federal police chief Joerg Ziercke met in Rome with Italian police officials to discuss the investigation.
The victims of the Duisburg murders were aged 16 to 38 and had been celebrating the 18th birthday of a man at an Italian restaurant on the evening of the killings. Five of them were related.
Their bullet-riddled bodies were found in two vehicles in a car park near the restaurant.
German police have released grainy closed-circuit TV pictures of what they believe were the two gunmen responsible for the shootings as they crossed the forecourt of a petrol station near the scene