Italian mafia fugitive arrested in Colombia after 4 years on the run visits Pablo Escobar’s grave

The Italian police announced on Friday the arrest in Colombia of a dangerous fugitive accused of being an intermediary between the Latin American country drug cartels and the Naples mafia.

Luigi Belvedere has been sentenced to almost 19 years in prison for international drug trafficking, but has been a fugitive since December 2020.

He was captured in the Colombian city of Medellín overnight.

Announcing his arrest, the Italian police released a photo of Belvedere visiting the tomb of Pablo Escobar, the founder and head of the Medellín cartel, who was murdered by police in 1993.

Belvedere, a broker from Caserta, north of Naples, “specialized in the illegal importation of cocaine (and) acted as an intermediary between Colombian cartels and some of the Casalesi clans,” the Italian Interior Ministry said in a statement. . statement,

The Casalesi are a notorious branch of the brawler mafia. Naples has been the traditional base of the mafia-type Camorra syndicate, which brings together many different clans.

Investigators located him in Columbia, where they said he was “active in organizing drug shipments from South America to Europe,” in part due to his use of a “well-known courier system,” police said.

Belvedere, believed to be around 32 years old and who was on the Italian Interior Ministry’s list of dangerous fugitives, was located with the support of Colombian investigators and the European Union police body, Europol.

The arrest comes about three months after a Norwegian man accused of leading a criminal network that trafficked cocaine from South America to Europe on sailboats was captured in colombia. Pazooki Farhad – nicknamed “The Professor” — was detained at El Dorado airport, while his alleged right-hand man and fellow Norwegian Bernsten Bjarte was captured in the Caribbean coastal city of Barranquilla, police said.