On the night of March 21, 2011, a big Egyptian fishing boat, 25 metres long, with a green steel hull and blue superstructure, arrived off the eastern coast of Sicily. The boat stopped about 20 kilometres short of Riposto, a seaside town in the shadow of Mount Etna, and waited. On board were 190 migrants and crew members – mostly Egyptian, a few of them Libyan.
The process of smuggling the migrants onto Italian soil, then into northern Europe, would soon start. Two smaller boats arrived to take the migrants to shore. The boats were owned by the family of Salvatore Greco, a top member of the Brunetto Mafia clan in eastern Sicily.
To the smugglers’ surprise, a third boat arrived – a police boat. Suddenly, Mr. Greco’s smuggling operation was dead in the water.
What Mr. Greco and his Egyptian associate, the smuggling kingpin Mohamed Badawi Hassan Arfa, did not know was that the Sicilian police had been monitoring their cellphone conversations since 2010. Based on the series of arrests and convictions after the smuggling voyage was intercepted, Sicilian police and prosecutors are certain the Mafioso and the Egyptian were part of an elaborate smuggling network that included money men in Milan and safe houses for the migrants, and that they had arranged five or six boat trips before they were busted.
No comments:
Post a Comment