The Camorra has the bombmaking capacity to carry out the sort of attack that claimed the life of anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone, Naples anti-mafia prosecutor Marco Del Gaudio said Tuesday.
''Absolutely, they have the know-how,'' Del Gaudio said after reports that award-winning author Roberto Saviano was in the mob's sights and a Camorra hitman was looking for a detonator.
Falcone, his wife and escort were blown up by a huge bomb under a Sicilian motorway, set off by remote control in 1992.
But Del Gaudio went on to stress that the tip-off about Saviano came from an ex-Camorrista who had left the Naples mafia ''a long time ago''.
''It's not cut-and-dried information you can base preventive action on. It's more of a prediction,'' he said.
Del Gaudio said the threat to ''a symbol'' like Saviano was well-known but there was even more evidence of planned hits against police officers from an organisation the interior ministry regards as having declared war on the Italian state.
He also recalled that 18 people, including three relatives of informants, had been killed in the last few months.
Saviano, whose 2006 expose' of a powerful Camorra clan has become a global bestseller, went to the Naples anti-mafia bureau Tuesday for talks about the reported threat.
He made no comment when he left after two hours with his five bodyguards.
Judicial sources named the source of the tip-off as Carmine Schiavone, a former Camorra member now living in a protected location.
Anti-mafia prosecutors said they would interview him as soon as possible on his reported assertion the Camorra wanted Saviano and his bodyguards dead by Christmas.
