Italian police on Thursday arrested 40 suspected members of two 'Ndrangheta gangs whose long-running feud erupted in a mid-August massacre in Germany.
The mobsters arrested in this Calabrian village included two brothers of the six men gunned down outside an Italian restaurant in Duisburg, northwest Germany on August 15.
None of those arrested - who included three men holed up in a bunker - is believed to have taken part in the massacre, police said.
However, police said they had caught the people who ordered and carried out an ambush here last Christmas in which a clan leader's wife was killed.
The Duisburg killings are believed to have come in revenge for that murder, the latest in a feud that began with an egg-throwing incident during a village feast in 1991.
Anti-Mafia officials said they were confident of eventually capturing the Duisburg killers with the help of other European police forces.
The 'Ndrangheta's power has been rising for decades and it is now considered more of a threat than Sicily's Cosa Nostra, with huge drugs revenue and a greater resistance to penetration by informants.
In November 2005 it signalled its new-found strength by murdering a prominent local politician.
In a 2006 report from Italy's national crime bureau DIA, the 'Ndrangheta was described as more ruthless than Sicily's Cosa Nostra or the Neapolitan Camorra.
It dominates drug trafficking in Europe, especially the cocaine market.
