The huge oil slick which threatened environmental disaster on Italy's River Po is under control, the head of the civil protection service said on Friday.
At least a million litres (260,000 gallons) of oil were deliberately released into the Lambro, a Po tributary, on Tuesday by saboteurs who broke into a disused refinery near Milan.
The oil entered the Po, forming a slick several kilometres long which began moving down the river, threatening wildlife, fishing grounds and tourist spots.
"The situation has greatly improved. We have continued monitoring throughout the night and have been able to establish that almost no more oil is coming from the Lambro," Guido Bertolaso said.
The slick is therefore "under control", he said, and the task now is "to recover all the oil which has by chance been held by the barrier put in place near Serafini island" on the Po near Cremona, around 100 km (60 miles) southeast of Milan.
There were fears the oil would wreak destruction on the delicate ecosystem of the Po delta, classed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
The Po flows 650 kilometres (400 miles) across northern Italy, irrigating the country's largest and most fertile plain, before reaching the Adriatic.
Farmers had voiced fears that the slick could contaminate underground water supplies, but Bertolaso said that at the moment this did not seem to have happened.
"As for the Po delta, which has the most fragile ecosystem, at the moment we are calm because of everything that has been done upstream," he said.
On Thursday Bertolaso said he expected most of the oil to be recovered by Friday evening.
The disused Lombardi Petroli refinery at Villasanta, where the saboteurs struck, is due to be converted as part of a housing project and should not have held such quantities of oil without special surveillance.
Italy's Environment Minister Stefania Prestigiacomo on Friday announced an "internal inquiry" to establish how the refinery came to be declassified as a high-risk facility.
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