A rather bizarre story has come to light of a F1 fan being arrested and then left, after he visited the Dutch GP, and was mistook as a mafia boss.
Mark L, 54, was taken into the custody while he was eating in a restaurant with his son in the Netherlands earlier in the week. He had visited the F1 Dutch GP over the September 3-5 weekend at Circuit Zandvoort.
The police burst in with a European Arrest Warrant issued by the Italian authorities, where he was blindfolded and taken away on Wednesday. The man from Liverpool was mistaken as Sicilian crime lord Matteo Messina Denaro, who is wanted over the bombings in 1993 in which 10 were killed and 93 injured.
He was subsequently freed after hurried procedure, but was left shaken due to the incident. His lawyer Leon van Kleef said: “It’s like a bad movie, a nightmare that my client has found himself in. Imagine one moment you are having a bite to eat and the next you are sat in a maximum-security Dutch prison.”
A spokeswoman for the Public Prosecutor’s Office, added: “Mark L is an English citizen and not the person claimed by Italy. The outcome of the investigation, which was conducted via an accelerated procedure, turned out to be negative. The public prosecutor then issued an immediate release order at the beginning of the evening.”
Here’s Toto Wolff and Christian Horner on ‘tactical foul’ about Monza
Here’s Toto Wolff/Lewis Hamilton and Christian Horner/Max Verstappen’s views
