FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
A notorious mob boss who escaped from a high-security prison in Italy last year using bed sheets has been recaptured in France, according to authorities in both countries.
According to foreign media, Marco Raduano, known as a dangerous criminal on Europol's most wanted list in Europe, was captured in Bastia, on the French island of Corsica, authorities said on Friday.
The 40-year-old from the Adriatic coastal town of Vieste managed to break out of the high-security Nuoro prison in Sardinia in February 2023, using the traditional method of knotted sheets to climb down the walls.
Matteo Piantedosi, the Italian interior minister, said Raduano's associate Gianluigi Troiano was also arrested near Granada in Spain, marking "another important blow to organized crime".
Raduano is the head of the Gargano clan, which operates within the "fifth mafia", a relatively unknown criminal syndicate based in Foggia, a southern province in Italy's Puglia. He was serving a 24-year prison sentence for various crimes, including participation in a criminal organization, drug trafficking, illegal possession of weapons and many other offenses, Europol reported.
Europol said he was the main figure in the group and a ruthless killer responsible for carrying out murders, drug trafficking and extortion.
Alongside Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria, the Camorra in Naples and the Sacra Corona Unita, investigators have in recent years identified the criminal organization based in Puglia, which was largely under the radar, as the fifth mafia.
According to the prosecutors, it is about a mafia characterized by a high degree of aggression and violence, "which took the corpses to the pigs in order not to leave a trace. A mafia that is unpredictable in its actions and therefore dangerous," the authorities said.
The Mafia in the province of Foggia emerged in the late 1970s, when the head of the Neapolitan mafia and founder of the New Organized Camorra, Raffaele Cutolo, met a delegation of local criminals in Puglia in order to "recruit" them into his organization and to expand his influence in the cigarette smuggling trade in the Balkans.
However, Cutolo's plan failed shortly after, due to an internal war from which one clan emerged victorious and gradually began to penetrate other areas of Puglia.
The Foggia Mafia is believed to have killed over 360 people in the Gargano area alone, with 80% of the murders still unsolved./ TheGuardian
Lini një Përgjigje