An anti-mafia round-up of 18 people on Friday - regarding alleged infiltration of the Neapolitan Camorra mafia into the northwestern Tuscan coastal area of Versilia - may be linked to last week's arrest of former Italian interior minister Claudio Scajola, investigators said Friday.
Two police agents, working for the Italian premier's office and the Lower House, were placed under house arrest in Friday's anti-mafia sting, accused of breaching the confidentiality of investigations.
Information leaks indicate that investigators has focused on the hypothesis that a mole may have furnished Scajola with privileged information on criminal investigations.
Scajola was arrested last week on suspicions that he helped former MP and businessman Amedeo Matacena flee Italian justice after a definitive conviction for Mafia links. Prosecutors in the southern city of Reggio Calabria said that they had uncovered "a network of complicity" that Amedeo Matacena "enjoys at high levels and thanks to which he was able to avoid arrest".
They issued a total of eight arrest warrants last week, including one for Matacena himself, who remains a fugitive.
On Friday, the Flying Squads of Caserta and Florence swooped on suspects believed by DDA anti-mafia investigators in Naples to be linked to the powerful Casalesi clan of the Camorra mafia, and to have worked to infiltrate the economic fabric of the Versilia area on behalf of the organized crime syndicate over a period of three decades.
Scajola, before falling from grace after a string of scandals, was a powerful ally of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi.
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