Anti-mafia police on Tuesday
arrested 16 suspected members of a drug trafficking ring
operating between Albania and Italy's southern Puglia region.
The arrests were made in Abruzzo, Puglia and Tuscany.
Five of the suspects are Italian and 15 are Albanian.
A further four suspects, all of them Albanian, could not be
located while another 18 people are under investigation.
Police also seized 11 kilos of hashish and 13.5 kilos of
heroin - which has a street value of some one million euros.
The ring allegedly smuggled heroin from Albania into Bari's
port, hidden on trucks and cars.
The investigation was sparked last year when police
discovered a lab in the city of Altamura, in which the drug was
cut and packaged into half-kilo units.
Among those named in the investigation is Marco Muserra, a
member of the Savino Parisi clan of the Sacra Corona Unita (SCU)
mafia in Bari.
A search of his premises yielded 11 kilos of drugs, a bank
account with 100,000 euros, land, real estate, and prize horses
worth 800,000 euros
The SCU is Italy's fourth and least powerful mafia after
Sicily's Cosa Nostra, Calabria's 'Ndrangheta and Campania's
Camorra.
Puglian crime groups including the SCU are less
international than the others, but still have a presence in
Albania, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, according to
Europol.
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