Sep 22 2008
First arrest in killings of Africans near Naples
Italian police on Monday arrested the first suspect in an attack blamed on the Neopolitan mafia that left an Italian and six Africans dead, as some 400 police reinforcements were deployed to the area.
Police said Alfonso Cesarano, 29, accused of murder and carrying illegal weapons, was arrested at his parents’ home in the town of Baia Verde, near Caserta, a Camorra mafia stronghold outside Naples.
Italy’s cabinet was set Tuesday to discuss deploying soldiers to join the fight against the southern Italian mafia, Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said on Monday, quoted by the ANSA news agency.
Bolstering the police forces with soldiers has had “excellent results” in the past, Maroni told reporters.
The first of the killings late Thursday took place in Caserta. The victim was a 53-year-old Italian, the owner of a local gambling hall, thought to have belonged to the mafia.
Minutes later, the six African victims — from Liberia, Togo and Ghana — were gunned down in the neighbouring coastal town of Castelvolturno, about 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of Naples.
A seventh African was wounded in the attack and was recovering in hospital, police said.
The same weapons and ammunition were used in both incidents, according to Italian media.
The scale of the carnage was unprecedented even in a region in the grips of the notorious Camorra mafia.
The Casalesi clan, considered the Camorra’s most dangerous and powerful, controls drug trafficking and prostitution in the Caserta area.
The brutal show of force may have been a settling of scores linked to drug trafficking, but investigators have made no official comment.
On Friday, some 200 African immigrants overturned cars and broke windows in protest at the killings on the main street of Castelvolturno.
The 7,000-strong African community on Sunday said its members had no links to the Camorra.
Some 3,000 soldiers have already been deployed in troubled Italian cities to bolster security, billed as a top priority for the centre-right government that came to power in May.
Roberto Saviano, author of “Gomorrah,” a best-selling expose on the Camorra whose film version won the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival in May, said the Casalesi clan was responsible for 16 murders in less than six months.
In a comment published in the daily La Repubblica on Monday, Saviano said a Nigerian organised crime syndicate has become powerful in the Caserta region.
“The Casalesi clan is afraid it will no longer be recognised as the one in charge from beginning to end,” he wrote, while stressing that no Nigerians were among the victims.
“It was the bloodiest massacre by the Camorra, there’s no doubt,” said ex-MP Lorenzo Dian, who was a member of the parliamentary anti-mafia committee.
“We can’t continue with a mere facade operation in the Caserta region. If we send the army, it should stay at least three years,” Dian told AFP.
However former anti-mafia judge Giuseppe Ayala warned: “The army can play only a support role because it doesn’t know how to fight the mafia.”
Rome used soldiers to fight the Sicilian Mafia, the Cosa Nostra, after the assassinations of judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.
Codenamed Sicilian Vespers, the operation lasted six years.
First arrest in killings of Africans near Naples: police – AFP – Sept 22 2008 – This story was found at: http://www.africasia.com/services/news/newsitem.php?area=africa&item=080922160755.t3k2yghy.php
