Italian police on Tuesday, Could 14, mentioned they’d focused 142 suspected members of the ‘Ndrangheta mafia in raids, together with clans concerned in drug trafficking and traditionally primarily based within the southern metropolis of Cosenza.
Some 109 folks had been detained following the daybreak raids that concerned Carabinieri federal police, native forces and specialist officers from the financial crimes unit, headed by anti-mafia prosecutors from the southern coastal metropolis of Catanzaro, police mentioned.
These arrested had been members of the well-known Lanzino-Patitucci and Zingari household clans from Cosenza, a metropolis in Calabria. An official from Italy’s customs and monetary police was additionally arrested in the course of the operation. One other 20 folks had been positioned below home arrest and 13 extra had been subjected to different restrictive measures.
The group is suspected of varied offences, together with being members of the ‘Ndrangheta, “drug trafficking aggravated by mafia affiliation” and different offences, in accordance with police.
Vincenzo Capomolla, Catanzaro’s public prosecutor, instructed reporters that mafia teams had been “asphyxiating” Cosenza’s shopkeepers and enterprise folks by way of extortion.
Their predominant exercise was drug trafficking, nonetheless, generally utilizing kids, he added. “Drug trafficking was one of many methods the ‘Ndrangheta exercised management over the territory,” he mentioned. “Solely folks authorised by the ‘Ndrangheta might visitors medicine. “Anybody engaged in unauthorised trafficking was punished – financially and bodily,” he mentioned.
The ‘Ndrangheta is predicated in Calabria, a poor area positioned on the tip of southern Italy. It is among the richest and strongest of the nation’s mafia clans, thanks specifically to its quasi-monopoly on the European cocaine commerce. It has a presence in round 40 different nations and has a suffocating maintain on Italy’s native authorities administration and basic inhabitants.
Drug smuggling submarine
Additionally on Tuesday, Italian police introduced the seizure of a remote-controlled submarine probably supposed to move medicine as a part of one other worldwide drug trafficking community.
Investigators made the weird discovery throughout probes into suspects primarily based in Turin in northern Italy, who had been cultivating marijuana below the duvet of managing automotive wash stations. “The traffickers had, amongst different issues, designed and examined a small remote-controlled submarine, most likely designed to move the medicine,” an announcement from the Carabinieri police mentioned. They hooked up a video taken throughout surveillance operations exhibiting the submarine, which is only a few metres lengthy, working on the floor of a physique of water.
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The community, headed by two brothers of Albanian origin, operated between Ecuador, Belgium, France, Spain and Italy, in accordance with the identical supply. The police reported seizing a complete of 204 kilograms of cocaine and cannabis in the course of the course of the investigation.