It was a courtroom, but it looked like a theater. A theater of the absurd though. With a staging costing three million euros, seven years of time, fifty thousand hours of telephone and environmental interceptions, a sea rescue ship rotting in port. The trial in which the crew and owners of the humanitarian ship Iuventa were among the main defendants concluded in Trapani.
In reality, even saying “trial” is technically wrong. In fact, we were still in the preliminary hearings phase. In short, the judge had to rule on the Prosecutor’s request for committal to trial, in what had been defined as “the mother of all investigations into NGOs”. A record. Seven years – we are in the theater of the absurd, after all – and about forty hearings (more correctly, hearing sessions), to arrive at the following conclusion: it was the same Public Prosecutor’s Office of Trapani to request the dismissal, and the Judge for the Preliminary Hearings gave his approval. It’s all over before it even begins.
The story was followed by the media all over the world. There was never a day of hearings missing in which there were no correspondents from Amnesty Internationalthe volunteers of Save The Children in front of the court, foreign media from Germany or France. On the other hand, the accusation was sensational, since for the first time, the crew of an NGO ship, the famous «sea taxi» (copyright Luigi Di Maio) had been caught: he did not save shipwrecked people, but made an agreement with Libyan traffickers to have the migrants delivered directly.
To arrive at this first conclusion, LThe Trapani Prosecutor’s Office, then, deployed the best investigative equipment available: satellite interceptions, geolocation of suspects in the Mediterranean, agents infiltrated among the volunteers. In the enthusiasm of having discovered the scam of the century, journalists and lawyers were also intercepted (there too, a few embarrassing apologies in Italy, a huge scandal, however, in the foreign media).
It was 2017. In Italy the prime minister was Gentiloni, the Minister of the Interior Minniti. In February, Italy had signed a pact with Libya that had made many people turn up their noses: it provided funding and resources for the Libyan Coast Guard to avoid the departures of migrants and to patrol the sea (the memorandum, in 2022, is been renewed). The Iuventa ship had been put into sea by a small association of young people from Berlin, the Jugend Rettet (“Youth to the rescue” in Italian) who had taxed themselves to finance the purchase and then the patrolling of the Mediterranean to save lives. The ship was seized, and today she rots in the port of Trapani, under the custody (on paper) of the Port Authority. They finished The activists of Doctors Without Borders and Save The Children were also investigated. Twenty-one people in all. The accusation: aiding and abetting illegal immigration. For Matteo Salvini, then Minister of the Interior, it was “proof of the collusion of humanitarian organizations with human traffickers”.
The pm theorem was as follows: the rescuers and NGOs participated in a criminal plan to encourage illegal immigration in Italy thanks to a “previous agreement” with Libyan traffickers which provided for “agreed deliveries” of migrants. What was the motive? Increase private donations to NGOs. The suspects, on the basis of this accusatory system, risked up to twenty years in prison. In the end, fifteen minutes were enough for judge Samuele Corso reading the storage device to close seven years of investigations. They were not acquitted. Worse: the crime just doesn’t exist. Land allegations were not proven and were not provable.
The investigation immediately revealed some glaring flaws. It all came from unspecified circumstances «confidences» made to the secret services by the private security (the Imi security service) of a ship chartered by Save the Children. The magistrates were convinced that they had documented at least three cases of “contact”, with the ships that intervened to rescue the refugees without them actually being in danger, but which, on the contrary, had been transhipped by the Libyan boats, with the smugglers who then they walked away undisturbed.
The deputy prosecutors of Trapani, in 2017, spoke of “serious clues”. In 2024 their colleagues, requesting the dismissal, were the first to deny them. In the meantime, some sensational facts have emerged. The prosecution’s key witnesses, for example, were unreliablebecause they had even been fired from the police for a series of serious negligence. The two “informants” instead, Pietro Gallo and Floriana Ballestra, former officers who entered the private security businessthey had sent the dossier to the secret services to Matteo Salvini, then in opposition. A strange triangulation. Ballestra had even met with Salvini, hoping for a political position, while Pietro Gallo was in contact with his staff.
The undercover agent’s images, believed to be key evidence of the deal, showed nothing but small lifeboats towing the migrants’ empty boats. And they were contradicted by other images shot by independent observers (journalists on board the ships as correspondents) or by the same cameras used by the rescuers in the missions. This aspect is very important, because there is one piece of data that stands out more than the others: in the thirty thousand overall pages of the investigation, in the eighty CDs which contain recordings of various phone calls, and in the other one hundred and twenty which contain days and days of wiretaps. there is not a single call or dialogue between a trafficker, smuggler, or whatever, and a volunteer, or member of an NGO, a collaborator. The famous agreement was supposed.
The prosecutor who started the investigation in 2016, Andrea Tarondo (who moved to Peru after this investigation) had filled two cupboards with documents. It will be his colleagues, when they try to put order in the mess, who will gradually find the elements that will lead them to ask for the case to be dismissed, starting with the unreliability of the key texts. But the routes of the ships and the official communications on the rescue were missing: all elements that would have allowed a different reconstruction of the facts. Already in 2017, Save the Children had made available all the material in its possession, which already denied the accusations. Yet we have continued until today.
In the meantime, the Iuventa ship, small and blue, abandoned in the port of Trapani, is sinking despite being “in custody” of the Coast Guard. A shipyard made some interventions, upon order of the Court, to save what could be saved, and prevent her from collapsing. He is still waiting for the payment of the twenty-five thousand euro invoice.
From June 2016 to the date of the kidnapping, Iuventa had carried out one hundred and seventy-five interventions, assisting twenty-three thousand people. Today the ship was released from seizure, but in its condition it cannot go anywhere. The fact does not exist, nor does the ship.
