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Calabrian mafia boss linked to "Duisburg massacre" is arrested

Other News Materials 7 August 2008 15:03 (UTC +04:00)

Italian police arrested Thursday a wanted Calabrian mafia boss who is the brother-in-law of a chief suspect in the August 2007 killings of six Italians in Duisburg, Germany, news reports said.

Police blocked the 31-year-old Paolo Nirta, after a short chase on foot down the narrow alleys of San Luca, a town considered the stronghold of the Calabrian version of the mafia, the 'Ndrangheta, reported dpa.

Nirta is the suspected acting-boss of the Nirta family which has been locked in a bloody fued with a rival clan, the Pelle-Vottari family, since the early 1990s.

Investigators who believe that the mob-style shootings in Duisburg a year ago were linked to the feud, have named Nirta's brother-in-law, Giovanni Strangio, as one of the suspected killers.

Paolo Nirta is also the brother of another of the Nirta clan's bosses, Giovanni Luca Nirta whose wife Maria was killed in a 2006 Christmas-day shooting which triggered the feud with the Pelle-Vottari clan.

Giovanni Luca Nirta was arrested weeks after the so-called "Duisburg massacre" while the father of the two brothers, Giuseppe, the crime-family patriarch, was arrested in May in one of a recent series of successful police operations against the 'Ndrangheta.

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