Ragusa – “Two years have passed since the disappearance in Acate of Daouda Diane, the Ivorian worker who disappeared into thin air after making a video complaint from inside the SVG plant, a concrete company in Acate”. This is what we read in a press release released today by Peppe Scifo, general secretary of the Cgil Ragusa. “Two years have passed since that 2nd July 2022 – writes Scifo of the Cgil – and no truth has emerged from the investigations. In recent days, the death in Latina of Satnam Singh, injured after an accident at work, and left to bleed to death without an arm after he was brought back and dumped on the street in front of his home, immediately made us think of the two tragic stories, although far apart in time and space, of Daouda and Satnam.
Daouda in his video message addressed to his friends and relatives in Ivory Coast always repeated “work here is death”. And it was the conditions of exploitation and absolute lack of safety that led Daouda to file that complaint against the company that employed him illegally.
In fact, there was no official employment relationship between him and the company. Yet Daouda was inside a cement mixer and was using a jackhammer.
That video remains the last and only trace of Daouda after which he disappears into thin air, and two years later still no truth has emerged. Yet Daouda’s disappearance brings us back to the methods already known in this land of ours, the lupara bianca, the elimination of every trace because every element that can lead back to the things reported must be erased.
If this is what happened, and the failure to find any traces of any kind, including the possible body, it is clear that we are faced with extremely serious facts and the dangerousness of individuals at large who operate as criminals within the official economy, testifying to the intertwining of crime and apparently legal business.
The disappearance of Daouda and the lack of truth opens a great wound in the conscience of this community, which until now has shown itself to be insensitive in the face of such serious and ferocious facts.
We ask – concludes Scifo of the Cgil – for truth and justice for Daouda and for all the victims of exploitation and violence resulting from a criminal economy that in recent years has increasingly managed to hide behind apparently legal corporate and entrepreneurial masks”.
