Catania prosecutor Carmelo Zuccaro told Italy's parliamentary anti-mafia commission Tuesday that there was a "mass of money" kept aside for migrant reception and that mafia organizations were getting attracted by it.
Zuccaro said he had only investigative evidence for the claim and added that it was "wrong to think the mafia operates everywhere, because that way we risk increasing its aura of omnipotence."
Zuccaro sparked a row last month by saying he had heard that migrant traffickers were funding some NGOs that rescued migrants to destabilize the Italian economy, although he had no hard evidence of this.
Zuccaro added in his testimony to the commission: "Last Saturday, a ship with 498 migrants arrived in Catania and if there our police units had been on the NGO ship that saved them, we would already have caught the traffickers, who would be in our jails. The target of the probes are the traffickers not the NGOs, " he added.
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