Intercepted mafia initiation rituals lead to 50 arrests

Rome, Sep 20 (IANS/AKI) Police held 50 suspects in Italy's south on Wednesday after they were overheard using phrases typical of the Puglia mafia or Sacra Colonna's initiation rites during wiretapped phone conversations.

The suspects face a plethora of charges including mafia association, conspiracy to murder, drug trafficking, holding illegal firearms and drug pushing, police said.

The arrests took place in several towns in Puglia's provinces of Brindisi, Lecce and Taranto and was spearheaded by anti-mafia prosecutors in Lecce, police said.

Investigators have implicated several of the suspects in the December 19, 2016 dynamite attack on the home of Francesco Lazzari, a local police chief in the town of San Donaci in the province of Brindisi, according to local news site brindisireport.it.

Italian authorities have vowed to crack down on organised crime in Puglia after a spate of mafia killings this year in its picturesque Gargano peninsula including the murders in broad daylight last month of two innocent bystanders who witnessed a suspected mafia hit.

The province of Foggia where the Gargano peninsula is located is beyond the control of the Italian state, Interior Minister Marco Minniti said last month.

Minnit pledged to ramp up security in the Gargano - a major tourist attraction - and said extra units of special investigators from Italy's top security agencies would also be relocated to Foggia province.

There have been 300 mafia-related murders in Puglia in the last 30 years and over 80 percent of these have gone unpunished, Italy's chief anti-mafia prosecutor Franco Roberti told Italian public radio RAI in August.

The mafia in the Puglia region "is more violent and aggressive" than the "better-organised" Sicilian and Naples mafia and the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria, according to Roberti.

--IANS/AKI

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