A 20-year-old Pole who was freed last week from a prison-like labor camp in southern Italy said conditions there were so grim that he feared for his life from the moment he woke.
"The newspapers can never describe what we lived through," said the man, Lukasz, one of 113 Poles freed on Tuesday after Italian authorities raided places they described as forced labor camps in the Puglia region, in the far southeast, where they said they suspected torture, rape, forced prostitution and possibly killing occurred.
Italy is no stranger to the plight of immigrants, and stories of their exploitation by organized criminals are well known. But these camps involved not the usual North African immigrants but rather the citizens of another EU country, subjected to extreme brutality.
According to news briefings by the Italian and Polish police, an international criminal ring lured an estimated 1,000 Polish farm workers to Italy to labor for paltry wages in squalid conditions. The police said the ring began to operate one to two years ago.
For many of the victims, the trap was sprung when they responded to newspaper advertisements promising seasonal jobs picking fruit and vegetables. What they got was nightmarishly different.
After paying an initial travel fee of about US$190, the Poles traveled by bus to Orta Nova, Italy, where they were assigned to some five camps in the region. The Poles were forced to work 12 hours a day, and sometimes 16, picking tomatoes under the eyes of armed guards.
Their promised pay of US$6.25 to US$9 an hour was reduced to US$1.25 to US$3.75 an hour, half the legal rate, according to police reports. But deductions for their bread, water and sleeping quarters left many with nothing and others in debt. Anyone unable to work because of sickness was docked US$25 a day.
"People were not only exploited for their work but also kept in a state of slavery," Italy's national anti-Mafia prosecutor, Piero Grasso, told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday in Bari.
Workers were held in rooms without heat, light or gas and were watched by guards, even at night, the police and prosecutors said.
At his camp near Orta Nova, Lukasz said, he slept on a mattress on the floor among mice and cockroaches amid an unyielding stench.
"We were treated worse than animals," he said.
According to an Italian prosecutor whose office worked with Polish authorities on the investigation, beatings occurred regularly in the camps, and at least one case in which a rape is suspected to have occurred is being investigated.
Investigators are continuing to interview workers. Italian and Polish news media reported that the tools of intimidation the guards used included guns, metal batons, electric Taser sticks and dogs.
A spokesman at the Polish embassy in Rome said that at least four workers appeared to have committed suicide in the camps, but their deaths were being investigated by Italian authorities because of suspicious circumstances.
"The Italian authorities have some doubts, and they want to investigate deeper," Wojciech Unolt, the spokesman, said.
An Italian prosecutor working on the case said that 27 people had been arrested, including Poles, Ukrainians, an Algerian and an Italian. An additional seven are being sought.
Coincidentally, Italy announced on Friday that it would lift restrictions on workers from eight new EU member states in Eastern Europe, including Poland, who are seeking work in Italy.
The other seven countries are the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovenia and Slovakia.
Lukasz, who declined to give his last name for fear of reprisal, spoke through an interpreter in a telephone interview hours before he was to leave Bari, a port city, to return to Poland.
Unlike many of the workers, he was at the camp only 10 days. He said he had spent more than US$500 and in the end had received nothing.
He said the supervisor of his work group was armed and often threatened them. And he said he had heard stories of workers disappearing.
When asked why he did not try to escape, he chuckled.
"If I would have had the money, I would have," he said. "But I didn't have any way to get back."
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion