Four migrant workers were burned alive in Italy – Reuters

In southern Italy, a brutal massacre took place against foreign workers who were laboring under slave-like conditions to harvest fruit. Four migrants were burned alive in a car at a gas station by their supervisors. 

The tragedy unfolded on Monday in the town of Amendolara, in the southern region of Calabria, where a completely burned-out van containing the bodies of the victims was discovered at a gas station. CCTV footage captured two perpetrators deliberately setting the vehicle on fire and quickly fleeing the scene.

 Thanks to the testimony of the sole surviving passenger, Taj Mohammad Alamyar, police were able to reconstruct the sequence of events. He said that after a hard day’s work picking strawberries, two Pakistani supervisors were driving the workers home. After stopping at a gas station, instead of buying fuel, the supervisors unexpectedly doused the interior with gasoline, locked the doors, trapping the people inside, and set the vehicle on fire. Alamyar himself miraculously managed to escape by climbing out through the trunk.

According to a witness, three of the victims were Afghan nationals, and the fourth was Pakistani. The motive for the brutal murder was a dispute over unpaid wages. The supervisors had promised the migrants a daily wage of 45 euros for an 8-hour shift, but the workers had not received their pay since April 20. Currently, Italian Carabinieri have already detained both foreign suspects; they are charged with committing premeditated mass murder under aggravating circumstances.

This incident has once again drawn attention to the acute problem of illegal labor exploitation and de facto slavery of immigrants in Italy’s agricultural sector. According to reports from the Placido Rizzotto Observatory, a specialized research center, at least 30% of all agricultural workers in the country are employed completely informally and regularly face severe violations of their rights, which sometimes lead to such fatal consequences.