"We have dismantled a powerful international organisation that was smuggling and exploiting human beings, and especially children," said Italian Interior Minister Giuliano Amato.

Police and prosecutors said the operation, centred on the southern city of Naples, smashed a gang suspected of kidnapping children, especially young girls, from orphanages in Nigeria and smuggling them into Europe to force them into prostitution.

The swoop was linked to two dozen arrests in the Netherlands and across Europe last October, when Dutch prosecutors detailed how the gang took children to the Netherlands, claimed asylum for them, then forced them into prostitution and drug smuggling.

The Italian swoop was coordinated by the anti-Mafia office, whose chief prosecutor Piero Grasso said police had also seized paperwork of the Nigerian gang listing names and phone numbers of 300 drug couriers used to smuggle cocaine in their stomachs.

Fifteen of the arrests were carried out abroad, mostly in the Netherlands, said Italian police, who added that the bust revealed cases of Nigerian women, resident in Italy, adopting Nigerian orphans only to force them into a life of crime.