Italian police and prosecutors were searching yesterday for the owner of a "hotel" in the centre of Milan where immigrants lived in squalor directly below a pavement on a city street. The Chinese "guests", who paid as little as €50 a month for their accommodation, came and went through a manhole in the pavement above.
The "hotel" had been created from a storeroom that extended from the basement of a block of flats out under the street. Police, alerted by neighbours to strange comings and goings, broke down a door connecting the storeroom to the rest of the building in the early hours of Tuesday.
As they entered, the immigrants - 12 of whom were in Italy illegally - tried to flee by way of the manhole. But the police had parked a patrol car on top.
Altogether, 28 people were found to have been sleeping under the street, or in a windowless space on the ground floor. But there was bedding for up 60 people.
The youngest resident of the "hotel", a 10-minute bus ride from the glittering boutiques of Milan's fashion quarter, was a four-month-old baby who slept in a storage basket in a cupboard.
Riccardo De Corato, Milan's deputy mayor, said: "Illegal immigrants have become a business for Chinese organised crime."
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