Polish farmworkers who travelled to southern Italy were kept in a ”concentration camp” where they were fed on little more than bread and water, expected to labour in the fields for up to 15 hours a day and beaten by guards who called themselves kapos, it was revealed recently.
Police across Europe were hunting seven mobsters who escaped when Italian carabinieri raided the camp at dawn on Tuesday. Sixteen others — 15 Poles and an Italian — were jailed in Italy and a further nine people were arrested in Poland as part of an extensive cross-border operation.
Prosecutors in the southern port city of Bari are looking into whether the deaths of two Poles found in the area might have been linked to the racket.
Poland’s police chief, Marek Bienkowski, said: ”Workers were beaten with cudgels and monitored by armed guards with dogs. Cases of rape have also come to light.” He said some of the workers were forced into prostitution by the criminal gang that had lured them to Italy.
Italy’s chief organised crime prosecutor, Piero Grasso, said the barracks where the workers were kept ”weren’t workplaces, but out-and-out concentration camps”.
Stories of the exploitation of immigrants by organised criminals are relatively common in Italy, as they are throughout the European Union. But it is highly unusual for the victims in such cases to be the citizens of another EU country and for the alleged abuse to be so extreme.
Bienkowski said: ”Gangsters in Poland recruited people looking for seasonal jobs picking fruit and vegetables in Italy through announcements in local newspapers. Those who applied were charged between £68 and £136 for the journey, plus another £102 when they reached Italy.”
The Poles were bussed to Orta Nova, near the Adriatic coast.
A source close to the Italian investigation said the guards referred to themselves as kapos, the name given to wartime concentration camp inmates who worked as guards.
The source said: ”The workers were not chained to their beds or anything like that, but they were kept in an isolated spot with no real chance of escape. We listened in to telephone calls they made to their relatives back in Poland in which the relatives said: ‘But why don’t you leave?’ And they answered: ‘But I don’t even know where I am’.” — Â