Italian mob suspect held in France after 16 years on the run

PARIS (AP) — Police in southeastern France have arrested a convicted murderer linked to Italy’s most powerful organized crime group, the ‘ndrangheta, who was on the run for 16 years, Interpol and Italian police said on Thursday.

Italy’s ANSA news agency reported that the 63-year-old had been working for the past three years as a pizza-maker in Saint Etienne, where he had lived since 2014.

An Interpol statement said French police, with help from Italian colleagues, arrested Edgardo Greco in Saint-Etienne. He was wanted for two murders in 2006 and accused of attempted murder in another case. Italian authorities said the two people killed in 2006 were brothers who were beaten to death with a metal bar in a fish shop in Calabria.

Interpol, the international police organization based in Lyon, France, said the killings were “part of a ‘mafia war’ … that marked the early 1990s” in Italy.

Investigations by Italian prosecutors in Catanzaro and police in Cosenza — both in southern Italy — led to the arrest, the Interpol statement said.

“No matter how hard fugitives try to slip into a quiet life abroad, they cannot evade justice forever,” Interpol chief Jurgen Stock was quoted as saying in the statement.

The ‘ndrangheta, based in the ‘toe’ of the Italian peninsula, is one of the world’s most powerful cocaine traffickers and is seen as the largest threat among organized crime syndicates. In recent years, ‘ndrangheta mobsters have been arrested around Europe and even in Brazil.

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