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IMMIGRATION

Migrant workers in Calabria protest after woman dies in tent city fire

Around 100 people protested in the town of San Ferdinando in south-western Italy on Monday after a fatal fire in a tent city housing hundreds of migrants.

Published: 29 January 2018 18:14 CET
Migrant workers in Calabria protest after woman dies in tent city fire
The encampment in Rosarno, where a fire killed one woman last weekend. Photo: Unione Sindacale di Base

The protesters marched in silence from the remains of the encampment to the town hall, according to the USB, a union that campaigns for migrant workers’ rights and which organized the demonstration.

Some of them held photos of Becky Moses, the 26-year-old Nigerian woman who died in the fire that broke out in the night between Friday and Saturday. Two other women were badly hurt and dozens of others received treatment for less serious injuries, La Repubblica reported.

According to the newspaper, Moses had only been staying in the encampment for a few days before her death. She was previously a resident in Riace, a small town on the other side of Reggio Calabria province that has rehoused refugees from all over the world as part of a widely praised resettlement programme.

However, having recently had her application for political asylum denied, Moses was obliged to leave Riace and had been sleeping instead in a tent in San Ferdinando.


Photo: Unione Sindacale di Base

The encampment, on the outskirts of San Ferdinando in an area called Rosarno, is home to around 1,000 people living in tents and shacks. Most of the residents work as labourers on local farms.

The shantytown sprang up after violence broke out between locals, migrants and police in 2010, leaving more than 50 people injured and prompting hundreds of foreign workers to flee the centre of town. Tensions have remained high in Rosarno ever since.

According to the Italian aid group Doctors for Human Rights (Medu), as many as 3,000 labourers – the majority of them with valid residence permits for Italy – live in the camp at the height of the harvest, working for minimal wages and sleeping without electricity or running water in conditions that the NGO describes as “shamefully inhumane”. It calls the tent city “one of the biggest ghettoes in Italy”.

The cause of the fire last weekend is unclear, though smaller blazes in the past have resulted from residents lighting bonfires for warmth.

As a result of Monday’s march, USB said, regional authorities have agreed to allow people living in the camp to register as local residents. Anyone whose documents were destroyed in the blaze will also be given an official certificate of loss to help them obtain replacements, the union said. 

CRIME

Germany mulls expulsions to Afghanistan after knife attack

Germany said Tuesday it was considering allowing deportations to Afghanistan, after an asylum seeker from the country injured five and killed a police officer in a knife attack.

Published: 4 June 2024 14:50 CEST
Germany mulls expulsions to Afghanistan after knife attack

Officials had been carrying out an “intensive review for several months… to allow the deportation of serious criminals and dangerous individuals to Afghanistan”, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser told journalists.

“It is clear to me that people who pose a potential threat to Germany’s security must be deported quickly,” Faeser said.

“That is why we are doing everything possible to find ways to deport criminals and dangerous people to both Syria and Afghanistan,” she said.

Deportations to Afghanistan from Germany have been completely stopped since the Taliban retook power in 2021.

But a debate over resuming expulsions has resurged after a 25-year-old Afghan was accused of attacking people with a knife at an anti-Islam rally in the western city of Mannheim on Friday.

A police officer, 29, died on Sunday after being repeatedly stabbed as he tried to intervene in the attack.

Five people taking part in a rally organised by Pax Europa, a campaign group against radical Islam, were also wounded.

Friday’s brutal attack has inflamed a public debate over immigration in the run up to European elections and prompted calls to expand efforts to expel criminals.

READ ALSO: Tensions high in Mannheim after knife attack claims life of policeman

The suspect, named in the media as Sulaiman Ataee, came to Germany as a refugee in March 2013, according to reports.

Ataee, who arrived in the country with his brother at the age of only 14, was initially refused asylum but was not deported because of his age, according to German daily Bild.

Ataee subsequently went to school in Germany, and married a German woman of Turkish origin in 2019, with whom he has two children, according to the Spiegel weekly.

Per the reports, Ataee was not seen by authorities as a risk and did not appear to neighbours at his home in Heppenheim as an extremist.

Anti-terrorism prosecutors on Monday took over the investigation into the incident, as they looked to establish a motive.

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