A woman from Italy’s Calabria region was murdered and fed to pigs in 2016 after refusing to give up her land to a neighbor with ties to a mafia clan, local media reported on Wednesday, citing former gangsters.
Maria Chindamo, a 42-year-old businesswoman, became the latest in a long line of people from the region to disappear without trace when she vanished on May 6, 2016 from outside her farm in the Limbadi municipality, near Calabria’s western coast.
Now Antonio Cossidente, a former mafioso who is working with the authorities, has alleged that an influential figure in the region’s ‘Ndrangheta mafia carried out the gruesome killing, according to a transcript published by regional news Web site Il Vibonese.
Cossidente said he got the information from a young ‘Ndrangheta member who he had met in prison and who has also quit organized crime, Emanuele Mancuso.
“The woman was fed to pigs,” he reported Mancuso had said.
Arrested in 2019 as part of the probe into Chindamo’s death but later released, the alleged perpetrator has close ties to the Mancuso clan.
The landowner’s disappearance came just one year after her husband had killed himself, complicating things for investigators.
Italian media reported that specialist anti-mafia police are examining the former mobsters’ allegations.
A rogue overgrown sheep found roaming through regional Australia has been shorn of his 35kg fleece — a weight even greater than that of the famous New Zealand sheep Shrek, who was captured in 2005 after six years on the loose. The merino ram, dubbed Baarack by rescuers, was discovered wandering alone with an extraordinarily overgrown wool coat, and was promptly shorn to save his life. Kyle Behrend, from the Edgar’s Mission farm sanctuary, said that it appeared Baarack was “once an owned sheep” who had escaped. Merino sheep do not shed their fleece and need to be shorn at least annually, as
‘GRAVE CONCERN’: A critic of the government died immediately following his complaints of torture at the hands of security forces, a human rights group said Students on Friday clashed with police in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, as anger mounted at the death of a writer and government critic in a high-security jail. At least 18 police and an unknown number of protesters were injured in the clashes, authorities and witnesses said, amid international demands for an independent investigation into the death of Mushtaq Ahmed. An Agence France-Presse correspondent witnessed police using batons and firing tear gas at students who staged a torchlight march calling for “justice” near the University of Dhaka. At least six students who allegedly attacked security forces with torches were detained, police said. More protests were planned
DMZ SWIM: Over more than three hours, South Korean surveillance cameras caught him eight times and audible alarms sounded twice, but border guards did not notice A North Korean defector wore a diving suit and fins during a daring six-hour swim around one of the world’s most fortified borders and was only caught after apparently falling asleep, a Seoul official said. South Korean forces did not spot the man’s audacious exploit, despite his appearance several times on surveillance cameras after he landed and triggered alarms, drawing heavy criticism from media and opposition lawmakers. Even after his presence was noticed, the man — who used diving gear to make his way by sea around the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that divides the Korean Peninsula — was not caught for another
China, under growing global pressure over its treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang, is mounting an unprecedented and aggressive campaign to push back, including explicit attacks on women who have made claims of abuse. As allegations of human rights violations in Xinjiang mount, with a growing number of Western lawmakers accusing China of genocide, Beijing is focusing on discrediting the female Uighur witnesses behind reports of abuse. Chinese officials have named women, disclosed medical data and information on their fertility, and accused some of having affairs and one of having a sexually transmitted disease. Officials said that the information was evidence of bad character,
RSS