Fugitive Boss Arrested in Lisbon: He Was Hospitalized for Covid

'Ndrangheta boss Francesco Pelle, 43, was arrested in Lisbon.

One of the most dangerous 'Ndrangheta leaders was tracked down by the Carabinieri in a clinic in the Portuguese capital where he was being treated for COVID-19. He had been missing since 2007. Francesco Pelle is now under guard at the Hospital de São José in Lisbon, where he is recovering from COVID-19.

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He was identified, following investigations by the Carabinieri of Reggio Calabria, by agents of the National Unit against Terrorism (Unct) of the Portuguese police who received the information as part of 'I Can', the project of the Central Directorate of Criminal Police in collaboration with Interpol for the capture of fugitives and the seizure of the illicit assets of the 'NdranghetaThe teams were activated through Interpool channels once the information collected gave reasonable certainty that the fugitive was actually hospitalized.

 Ciccio Pakistan had been sentenced to life imprisonment

Francesco Pelle, known as “Ciccio Pakistan”, the fugitive boss arrested today, had been definitively sentenced to life imprisonment by the Supreme Court in 2019 as the instigator of the Christmas massacre of December 24, 2006 in which Maria Strangio, wife of the opposing clan leader Giovanni Luca Nirta, was killed. An episode that, in the San Luca feud between the Pelle-Vottari and the Nirta-Strangio families, served as a prologue to the August 2007 massacre in Duisburg, Germany, with 6 deaths. Pelle – who is confined to a wheelchair after being wounded in an ambush on July 31, 2006 in Africo – was in Milan at the time of his escape, where he was under house arrest while awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling. Once that was issued, Pelle disappeared at the beginning of July. Pelle had already spent a year on the run after the Duisburg massacre and was arrested by the Carabinieri in September 2008 in a clinic in Pavia. The ambush on Christmas 2006 that gave rise, as a reaction, to the Duisburg massacre, had Gianluca Nirta as its target, but instead his wife died while four people, including a child, were injured. According to the prosecution's reconstruction, the plan for the revenge on the following August bank holiday was Giovanni Strangio, Maria's cousin, who was later sentenced to life imprisonment.