FLORENCE, Italy, May 20 (UPI) -- Italian police have arrested 30 Chinese nationals operating in the country, in a crackdown on human trafficking and organized crime, a police statement said.
Police made the arrests Thursday following a two-year probe into Chinese and Albanian criminal gangs that involved 1,500 investigators, the anti-Mafia police command in Florence announced.
The suspects were charged with crimes including conspiracy, human trafficking, kidnapping, theft, extortion and possession of arms and false documents, the South China Morning Post reported Friday.
The investigation had turned up operational links between the Chinese and Albanian crime syndicates, especially in the trafficking of illegal immigrants. Chinese immigrants were transported from Beijing, through Greece and Albania to the Italian port city of Ancona, where many were detained by criminal gangs until they were ransomed.
The ransoms were sometimes paid by employers who then forced the immigrants to work and pay them back, amounting to virtual slave labor.
Other cases linked to the group included 20 store holdups and eight cases of protection racketeering, the police said.
