Vulnerable people persuaded to have arm or leg mutilated to look like they had been in road accident

Sicilian gangsters dropped 25kg (55lb) cast-iron weights on to the limbs of drug addicts, alcoholics and other vulnerable people to obtain insurance payments for fake car accidents worth hundreds of thousands of euros, according to police, who have arrested 11 people in the case.

Among the suspects is a nurse at a hospital in the capital, Palermo, who police allege procured mild anaesthetics from her workplace to subdue the pain.

According to prosecutors, the weights, like those used in gyms, were dropped on to an arm or leg, which had been immobilised between blocks of cement, the Italian news agency ANSA reported. Sometimes ice was used to try to deaden the pain before the limbs were crushed.

Police said electronic surveillance picked up the screams of those being mutilated in private homes or warehouses. They released a video of some of the intercepted conversations, indicating that the gang had accomplices in several of Palermo’s clinics and hospitals. In one call, a suspect told another that an ambulance and a wheelchair would be needed the next day.

After the limbs were smashed, the injured people were taken to hospitals where accomplices would handle their cases, authorities said.

Rodolfo Ruperti, who heads the Palermo police operations squad, said the suspects went to the train station in Palermo to recruit drug addicts, alcoholics, those with mental health issues and poor people desperate for money. “They were attracted by the mirage” of a lot of money, Ruperti told RAI state TV.

But those who agreed to participate in the scheme by having their limbs smashed generally received a few hundred euros, while the gangsters kept hundreds of thousands of euros in insurance payments, authorities said.

“They were both accomplices in the scheme and victims,” Ruperti said of those who agreed to have their limbs broken.

A smashed arm and a leg could result in as much as €150,000 in insurance payments, said Ruperti. He said a network of accomplices included those who agreed to falsely claim they had witnessed a car hitting someone.

Ruperti said investigators were still trying to determine how much money had been defrauded and how many years the scheme had been going.



SkyTG24 TV said about 70 people were known to have had their limbs smashed.

The investigation was triggered by the discovery in January 2017 of the mutilated body of a Tunisian man on a Palermo street. He was initially presumed to be the victim of a road accident, but was later determined to have died of a heart attack after having his limbs smashed.