Girl brain-dead after Mafia shoot-out

A 14-year-old girl is said to be brain dead after being caught in a Mafia shoot-out in Naples.

Her father and the country’s interior minister said she had been killed yesterday, but doctors at Naples’ Loreto Mare hospital said the teenager was in an irreversible coma and had not yet been declared dead, the ANSA news agency reported.

They stressed, however, that it was just a matter of time.

The girl was standing outside her flat with two friends at around midnight when two men riding on a motorcycle started shooting, apparently aiming for a member of a rival clan of the Camorra organised crime syndicate, the Neapolitan version of the Sicilian Mafia.

The girl was hit in the head. The assailants and their target got away, reports said.

In a statement, interior minister Giuseppe Pisanu called the shooting a “barbarous assassination”, and dispatched the police vice chief to Naples to attend an emergency meeting of the provincial committee for public security.

The aim, he said, was to co-ordinate efforts to “arrest all those responsible for this atrocious crime and to reinforce prevention activity”.

The girl’s father, Giovanni Durante, appeared on all the major television stations in tears, saying his daughter had been killed and asking for her remains to be turned over to the family so she could be buried.