Germany killings 'unprecedented escalation of mafia feud'

The execution-style killings of six Italians in Germany marks an unprecedented escalation of the operations of southern Italy’s ’ndrangheta crime syndicate, exporting a vendetta abroad for the first time, Italian officials said today.

Interior Minister Giuliano Amato said the killings were the latest chapter in a feud between rival clans of the ’ndragheta organisation based in the tiny Calabrian town of San Luca.

“What happened was a qualitative leap,” in the feud, said deputy Interior Minister, Marco Minniti. “That this feud finds a second chapter outside the territory in which these clans move, and beyond the national borders,” is unprecedented and worrisome, he told a press conference.

Italy’s national anti-Mafia prosecutor Piero Grasso told Sky TG24: “It’s absolutely new.”

Amato said one of the six men killed in Duisburg, Germany was apparently involved in the original ’ndrangheta feud, known as the “San Luca feud” for the Calabrian town where it began in 1991.

Amato said the man, whom he didn’t identify, “probably was expecting something would happen because it seems he was looking for weapons to defend himself.”

Amato said, however, that the victims all appeared to have been taken surprise by the shootings, which occurred outside an Italian restaurant.

Indeed, Grasso said the victims had probably moved to Germany to avoid the bloodshed of San Luca. “But it reached them there,” he told Sky.