JERUSALEM -- Israel is worried about becoming a haven for underworld leaders from former Soviet republics, Police Minister Moshe Shahal said Tuesday.
He said that such crime figures had secretly convened recently in the Jewish state and were believed to be planning to meet in the coming days in Tel Aviv.
Interviewed on Israel radio from a United Nations conference in Naples, Italy, on mapping strategy against organized crime, Shahal said overseas criminals seemed to have comfortable access to Israel, said The Associated Press.
Shahal noted a ready availability of Russian speakers and services, alluding to a huge immigration wave from the former Soviet Union that has topped 500,000 since 1989.
At the conference, Russia's Interior Minister Viktor Yerin told delegates that talk of an explosion of mafia crime in his country since the collapse of Soviet communist rule was being whipped up to isolate Moscow politically and economically in Cold War style.
"We do not share the exaggerated estimates of the danger posed by organized crime from the territory of the former Soviet Union, including Russia, contained in some mass media, both foreign and Russian," Yerin said.
"Such statements often (recall) the language of Cold War times -- `The Russians are coming,'" he told delegates to the three-day ministerial conference.
But, despite Russia's attempts to downplay the problem, UN and Italian officials say they want the meeting to go as far as possible towards harmonizing national legislation so that there is no "hiding place" for crime multinationals whose tentacles spread across the globe.
Argentina has proposed that the meeting, which ends Wednesday, should examine whether an international convention is needed to cover the war on mafia crime. Current conventions deal only with drugs and piracy, while mob activities have extended to virtually any illegal activity for profit.
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