Lampedusa disaster traffickers arrested

(By Christopher Livesay) (ANSA) – Palermo, November 8 – Police arrested two alleged organizers of the voyage that ended in a disastrous shipwreck off Italy’s Lampedusa island last month, taking the lives of 366 migrants seeking safe haven in Europe, investigators said Friday, adding that all the women aboard were raped by the traffickers. Mouhamud Elmi Muhidin, a 34-year-old from Somalia, was identified when shipwreck survivors in Lampedusa’s migrant holding centre attempted to lynch him. Elmi Muhidin is accused of kidnapping, trafficking human beings, conspiracy to commit crimes aimed at illegal immigration, and sexual violence. Forty-seven-year-old Palestinian Attour Abdalmenem has been charged with aiding and abetting illegal immigration.

At a press conference after their arrest, Corrado Empoli, head of the flying squad in the Sicilian city of Afrigento, said that the 155 survivors of the trek from the Horn of Africa through the Sahara and across the Mediterranean from Libya said all the female asylum seekers from Syria, Eritrea and Somalia on the voyage were raped by the traffickers.

“It has emerged from the tales of the survivors of the October 3 wreck that all the women were raped by the members of the criminal organisation that ran the migrant trafficking,” he said. The shipwreck, one of the worst maritime disasters in recent history, is believed to have been sparked when someone set fire to a blanket to signal for help at sea, setting ablaze the vessel that was carrying as many women and children as there were men.

It was followed 10 days later by one that killed 34 other North African migrants, spurring Italy into organising a major new search-and-rescue operation called Mare Nostrum and securing more European Union help to try to cut the death toll of asylum seekers crossing the Mediterranean on rickety craft. Lampedusa, closer to Africa than Italy, is the main port of entry into Europe for migrants smuggled by boat from Libya or Tunisia.

Each year, tens of thousands of people make the perilous journey across the Mediterranean in often rickety and overcrowded vessels.

According to the government, some 30,000 have arrived in Italy so far this year. As recently as last week, a boat with 170 migrants arrived in Lampedusa, and another 198 migrants were rescued further north in the Sicilian Channel on the same day.