A deadly mafia member and killer, Santo Vottari has been arrested after being on the run from police for 10 years.
Santo Vottari was caught hiding in this bunker
A notorious mobster has been arrested hiding behind the trap door
of a bunker after going on the run over a 2007 mafia massacre in
Germany, Dailymail reports.
The man identified as Santo Vottari, 45, has been detained by
police in Calabria in Southern Italy after a decade on the run as the
suspected boss of the 'Ndrangheta crime clan.
He was caught after Carabinieri paramilitary police on Wednesday
opened a trapdoor in a bunker in a drab apartment residence in the
hamlet of Ricciolino di Benestare and discovered the mafia boss huddled
in a crawl space.
Vottari was convicted in absentia in 2009 of being one of the heads
of an 'Ndrangheta clan whose feud with local rivals culminated in the
Duisburg killings.
He was given a prison term of 10 years and eight months, two years
after he went on the run. Interior Minister Marco Minniti praised the
police team that tracked him down to a building which had no fewer than
four concealed bunkers in it.
Inside the fourth one they searched, on the top floor of the
building, they found a trapdoor leading to another bolthole, where they
found Vottari squashed into a space just big enough to hold someone
hiding out for a few hours.
'I'd like to congratulate the police... for bringing one of Italy's most wanted and dangerous men to justice,' Minniti said.
Vottari was one of 31 people sentenced to prison terms in 2009 in
connection with the Duisburg killings, which happened after a vendetta
between two clans based in the same village, San Luca, spiralled out of
control.
The feud between the Nirta-Strangio and Pelle-Vottari clans
reportedly began with an egg-throwing prank in 1991. Reprisals escalated
after the killing, on Christmas Day, 2006, of Maria Strangio, the wife
of clan leader Giovanni Nirta.
The feud was blamed for at least 16 deaths in total, with the
killings in Germany bringing it to international attention. Giovanni
Strangio was convicted in 2011 of being the mastermind and one of the
authors of the Duisburg killings. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Seven others were given life sentences linked to the feud at the same
trial.
Notoriously ruthless, the 'Ndrangheta has surpassed Sicily's
Cosa Nostra and the Naples-based Camorra in influence thanks to its
control of Europe's cocaine trade.
The organisation is made up of numerous village and family-based
clans based in the rural, mountainous and under-developed "toe" of
Italy's boot.
The name 'Ndrangheta comes from the Greek for courage or loyalty
and the organisation's secretive culture and brutal enforcement of codes
of silence have made it very difficult to penetrate.
But authorities claimed a major breakthrough last year when they
captured Ernesto Fazzalari, whom they described as the last senior
'Ndrangheta fugitive still at large.
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