CROTONE – Maysoon Majidi, the 28-year-old Iranian activist arrested last December on charges of being a smuggler, after landing with 76 other migrants in Crotone, remains in prison. The investigating judge Elisa Marchetto, deeming the danger of escape to exist, rejected the defense request, advanced by the lawyer Giancarlo Liberati, to replace the more serious precautionary measure with the domiciliary one in a house made available by the Sabir association.
In prison in Crotone the Iranian activist lost 13 kilos. The prosecutor opposed the request for house arrest because Maijidi reported an attempt to reach Germany. The lawyer, however, explained, in his detailed statement, that the reason why she had left with four other people, including a brother, on board a tender was to reach Germany but to more easily obtain the status of refugee, having already formalized the asylum request through the UNHCR, the UN agency that assists those fleeing wars and persecution. A version confirmed by the co-suspect Akturk Ufik who, during an interrogation, admitted to having been the “captain” of the boat and “exonerated” the woman by stating that she was a migrant like the other passengers and that she did not never helped in managing the crossing. «I met her on the boat, she intended to go to Germany, since I also wanted to go there we decided to make the trip together with her and others».
The “serious, precise and consistent clues” deduced by the investigators for the application of the precautionary measure are taken only from the declarations of two migrants, who claimed that the woman “was always on top with the captain” and “gave us something to drink”, and from two videos contained in the memory of his mobile phone, recorded just before his arrival on the Italian coast and shot to his family to reassure them about his and his brother’s conditions. But the evidentiary incident to crystallize the witnesses’ declarations was requested and obtained by the Crotone prosecutor’s office two months after the landing, when the migrants had already left Italy, notoriously a transit destination in the odyssey of those fleeing from the massacres and embark on journeys of hope. The final destination of migrants is very often in Northern European countries. The evidentiary incident was therefore cancelled, resulting in the two texts being “untraceable”. Yet one of them had been identified by the lawyer Liberati because he was a guest at a migrant center managed by the German state, the one in Tegel, near Berlin.
The lawyer also proposed at the hearing to contact him via video call on WhatsApp but, in the absence of the prosecutor’s favorable opinion, the investigating judge could only declare the evidentiary matter “concluded”. Yet the two witnesses could exonerate the woman: they have already told the lawyer Liberati, after hearing about Majidi’s arrest, that their statements had been misrepresented due to a translation error. For example, in one case the interpreter did not speak the “Soranî” dialect, the only one the Iraqi Kurdish witness knows. But the doubts, the defense always maintains, could have been dispelled by examining a highly popular video on Instagram (around 5 thousand views) which films the migrants while almost all of them are on deck. “Above”, therefore, there were not only the woman and Akturk. However, the request for questioning was accepted and will take place next Friday in front of prosecutor Multari in the Castrovillari penitentiary, where the suspect has been held since last December.
The woman claims to be able to provide investigators with the organization chart of a transnational gang of Turkish origin that organized not only the trip with which she arrived in Crotone but many others. The defender’s repeated request for questioning had so far been inexplicably ignored. It cannot be ruled out that the documents could be transmitted to the Catanzaro DDA, which is investigating the Aegean route, which has been used for decades by traffickers who profit from desperation. In fact, the lawyer Liberati asked that a prosecutor from the DDA also participate in the interrogation.
