Italian police arrest 2 more suspects in 2007 mafia killing in Duisberg, Germany

Italy arrests 2 in 2007 mafia killing in Germany

ROME — Italian police arrested two more suspects Thursday in the 2007 mafia shooting that left six people dead in Germany.

Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said that, with Thursday’s arrests, all three people allegedly responsible for the Duisburg massacre have been detained.

Six Italian men were gunned down Aug. 15, 2007, as they left a birthday party at an Italian restaurant in the western German city of Duisburg.

Prosecutors say the massacre was part of a long-running feud between two clans of the ‘ndrangheta organized crime group of Italy’s southern Calabria region.

Authorities nabbed Giovanni Strangio from an Amsterdam apartment in March. They arrested Giuseppe and Sebastian Nirta on Thursday in the Calabrian town of San Luca, where the feud is based.

The feud, which pitted the Nirta-Strangio families against the Pelle-Romeo families, cooled from 2000-06 but erupted again when Maria Strangio, the wife of one of the presumed heads of the clan, was killed on Dec. 25, 2006.

The slayings in Duisburg, an industrial city in Germany’s Ruhr region, marked the first time a southern Italian crime syndicate had exported a vendetta.

The ‘ndrangheta, linked to crime around the world, is today considered more powerful than the Sicilian Mafia.