A senior Catholic cleric arrested in a plot to smuggle millions of euro into Italy controlled vast amounts of money and felt he could act with impunity because of his connections to the Vatican bank, claims a judge’s investigative document.

A senior Catholic cleric with connections to the Vatican bank was arrested for plotting to help rich friends smuggle tens of millions of euro in cash into Italy from Switzerland, in the latest blow to the Vatican’s image.

The Pope has set up an inquiry to look into the activities of the troubled Vatican bank amid a new money-laundering investigation and continued questions about the secretive institution.

An Italian court has convicted a man with a fetish for cutting off women’s hair of the 1993 murder of a teenager, months after he received a life sentence in Britain for a similarly gruesome murder.

IRISH authorities are to evacuate 1,000 civilians by chartered ship from the besieged Libyan city of Misrata.

Irish authorities are to evacuate 1,000 civilians by chartered ship from the besieged Libyan city of Misrata.

Insurgents launched pre-dawn attacks today on a major Nato base in eastern Afghanistan and a nearby camp where seven CIA employees were killed last year in a suicide bombing.

A CIRCUS of horrors has been discovered in Salerno, south of Naples, in a daring raid by the carabinieri — saving a teen who was forced to swim with flesh-eating piranhas for the amusement of onlookers.

Italian drivers who like to use roads as their personal race-tracks are about to lose the race.

Italian police today found cocaine worth €60m in a British registered freighter after it docked in Salerno.

An overnight express train from Rome derailed this morning when it slammed into a mudslide in the southern region of Calabria during a rain storm.