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Italian police announced on Friday the arrest in Colombia of a dangerous fugitive accused of being the intermediary between the Latin American country’s drug cartels and the Naples mafia.
Luigi Belvedere has been sentenced to almost 19 years in jail for international drug trafficking but has been on the run since December 2020.
He was captured in the Colombian city of Medellin overnight.
Belvedere, a broker from Caserta, north of Naples, “specialised in the illegal importation of cocaine (and) acted as a intermediary between Colombia cartels and some of the clans of the Casalesi”, police said.
The Casalesi are a notorious branch of the Neapolitan mafia, the Camorra.
Investigators located him in Columbia, where they said he was “active in the organisation of drug shipments from South America to Europe”, in part because of his use of a “well-known messaging system”, police said.
Italian police released a photo of Belvedere visiting the grave of Pablo Escobar, the founder and boss of the Medellin cartel, who was killed by police in 1993.
Belvedere, believed to be around 32 years old and who was on the Italian interior ministry’s list of dangerous fugitives, was tracked down with the support of Columbian investigators and European Union policing body Europol.
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