Police across Europe arrested more than 100 people Wednesday in a wave of raids against one of Italy’s most notorious organized crime groups.
The Carabinieri, a branch of Italian law enforcement, said that 108 people were served arrest warrants on charges including international drug trafficking, money laundering and possession of weapons.
Arrests were also carried out in Germany, Belgium, France, Portugal, Romania and Spain.
Authorities have been waging an intense campaign against the ’ndrangheta, arguably the world’s richest organized crime group, in recent years.
The operation was led by officers in Reggio Calabria, a city in the Calabria region in the “toe” of Italy, which has long been associated with organized crime.
Italian police released a video showing seized items including gold bars, handguns, assault rifles and stacks of cash.
Bavarian police spokesman Ludwig Waldinger told the Reuters news agency that officers in Munich raided a car-wash that was being used as a front for criminal activity.
Some 500 officers took part in raids in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in western Germany. Another 500 emergency services personnel were involved in searching 51 addresses in neighboring North Rhine-Westphalia to the north.
An unnamed 47-year-old man was arrested in the city of Saarbrücken, Germany’s southern border with France, in an operation involving 30 special police units and riot police. Both his house and business premises were searched, prosecutors said.
German and Italian authorities were due to hold news conferences later on Wednesday to provide more details on the operation.
The operations were carried out in partnership with Europol, the international policing agency, and Eurojust, the European Union agency dealing with judicial cooperation across borders.
A huge multinational police operation to bring members of ‘ndrangehta to justice has made a string of arrests in recent years.
In 2021 some 350 suspects went on trial in a specially-built courthouse in the Calabria region, the group’s heartland, with prosecutors submitting 15,000 pages of evidence.
In February this year French police arrested mafia hitman Edgardo Greco, 63, who had links to the ‘ndrangetha group and spent 16 years on the run after being convicted of killing two people in the 1990s. He had been working in a pizza restaurant in France under an assumed identity.
In January Italian police arrested the most wanted man in the country, mafia boss Messina Denaro, who had spent three decades on the run. He is suspected to have been the leader of the Cosa Nostra crime group and was apprehended as he went for a doctor’s appointment at a clinic in Palermo on the island of Sicily.
Associated Press contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
