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BANK

Italian police catch one of Sweden’s ‘most wanted’

One of Sweden’s most wanted criminals was arrested in Sicily by Italian police for attempted murder and robbery of a bank in central Sweden.

The man, 33-year-old Dritan Hoxha, was arrested in a dawn raid in Siciliy last Thursday and is suspected of a bank robbery in Kopparberg, near Örebro in central Sweden in January, 2007.

In the 2007 heist, Hoxha, who is an Albanian citizen, stormed a bank armed with a gun and took 250,000 kronor ($38,000). Several people who were involved in the robbery have already been caught and imprisoned for their role in the theft.

Hoxha has been on the Swedish National Bureau of Investigation’s (Rikskriminalpolisen) Ikaros List of Sweden’s wanted fugitives since 2011.

“We’re getting through them one by one, sooner or later we’ll get them all,” said Bertil Olofsson of the National Police Board (Rikspolisstyrelsen) to the Sydsvenskan newspaper.

Olofsson is the head of a specialist section of the police that deals with fugitives – both inside and outside of the county. Some thirty countries in the world have similar police forces.

“That we can have people who are dealing 100 percent with this can influence the result,” Olofsson told the paper.

Hoxha is now in a prison in Catina awaiting extradition to Sweden.

TT/The Local/og

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ACCIDENT

German tourists among 13 dead in Italy cable car accident

Thirteen people, including German tourists, have been killed after a cable car disconnected and fell near the summit of the Mottarone mountain near Lake Maggiore in northern Italy.

German tourists among 13 dead in Italy cable car accident
The local emergency services published this photograph of the wreckage. Photo: Vigili del Fuoco

The accident was announced by Italy’s national fire and rescue service, Vigili del Fuoco, at 13.50 on Sunday, with the agency saying over Twitter that a helicopter from the nearby town of Varese was on the scene. 

Italy’s National Alpine and Speleological Rescue Corps confirmed that there were 13 victims and two seriously injured people.

Italian daily Corriere della Sera reported that German tourists were among the 13 victims.

According to their report, there were 15 passengers inside the car — which can hold 35 people — at the time a cable snapped, sending it tumbling into the forest below. Two seriously injured children, aged nine and five, were airlifted to hospital in Turin. 

The cable car takes tourists and locals from Stresa, a resort town on Lake Maggiore up to a panoramic peak on the Mottarone mountain, reaching some 1,500m above sea level. 

According to the newspaper, the car had been on its way from the lake to the mountain when the accident happened, with rescue operations complicated by the remote forest location where the car landed. 

The cable car had reopened on April 24th after the end of the second lockdown, and had undergone extensive renovations and refurbishments in 2016, which involved the cable undergoing magnetic particle inspection (MPI) to search for any defects. 

Prime Minister Mario Draghi said on Twitter that he expressed his “condolences to the families of the victims, with special thoughts for the seriously injured children and their families”.

Infrastructure Minister Enrico Giovannini told Italy’s Tg1 a commission of inquiry would be established, according to Corriere della Sera: “Our thoughts go out to those involved. The Ministry has initiated procedures to set up a commission and initiate checks on the controls carried out on the infrastructure.”

“Tomorrow morning I will be in Stresa on Lake Maggiore to meet the prefect and other authorities to decide what to do,” he said.

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