The authorities in Italy and Poland said that at least four workers appeared to have committed suicide in the camps, in Italy’s southern region of Puglia, but that those deaths were being investigated as suspicious.
Italy’s anti-Mafia chief, Piero Grasso, told reporters in the southern city of Bari.
“To call the situation revealed by the carabinieri investigation simply inhuman does in no way do it justice. We are talking about conditions similar to those of concentration camps, where people were not only exploited for their work, but also kept in a state of slavery.”
Twenty people were arrested for human trafficking, and the police were looking for seven more. They were said to be members of a ring that recruited people in Poland through advertisements in local newspapers promising them agricultural work in Italy.
Poland’s national police chief, Marek Bienkowski, said at a news conference in Warsaw that the workers were watched by Ukrainian, Italian and Polish armed guards. He added that there was evidence of rape and of torture with metal batons of those who tried to resist. Dogs were set against some victims.
The Italian police said the Poles were forced to work for up to 15 hours a day and were fed little more than bread and water. The Polish news agency PAP said more than 1,000 Poles may have been victims of the ring. Apart from the four suicides being investigated, the police in both countries did not rule out the possibility that more people might have been killed or died from exhaustion.
No comments:
Post a Comment