Traffickers are organised as tour operators, says Sicilian prosecutor

The best way to understand the commercial scale of human trafficking across the Mediterranean, says a leading Italian investigator, is to view the people smugglers as tour operators.

"They organise the whole package with separate payments for each segment," says Francesco Lo Voi, the chief prosecutor of Palermo. "Thanks to their contacts they can manage the entire trip, from the country of origin to the final destination.

"In many cases, refugees remain vulnerable and captive to traffickers even after they reach Italy, especially if they want to make their way north to other European countries."

European leaders were set to meet on Thursday in Brussels to hash out more aggressive plans to stem the migration crisis after a boat carrying 800 people capsized off Libya on Sunday, leaving 28 survivors.

But it is prosecutors in Sicily who are on the frontline, pursuing the human traffickers and criminal networks responsible for what Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, has called a "21st century slave trade".

Mr Lo Voi has been hardened by decades of battling the Mafia but the deaths of hundreds of migrants in the Mediterranean have touched a nerve.

"These are tragedies upon tragedies," Mr Lo Voi says in his heavily guarded office on the second floor of the main courthouse in Sicily's largest city.

"It's already a tragedy for these people to go through a journey like that under those conditions," he says in an interview. "But to see the people next to you - who you were hoping to go live in a better place with - get killed, is even worse."

Mr Lo Voi's counterparts in Catania, eastern Sicily, immediately ordered the arrest of a Tunisian and a Syrian alleged to have been the captain and a crewman on suspicion of multiple homicide after they were identified by survivors of last weekend's deadly accident.

In Palermo Mr Lo Voi announced a sweeping investigation into a gang of smugglers led by Ethiopians and Eritreans who were operating in Libya and in large Italian cities and refugee reception centres. Fifteen people were arrested and an international hunt is on for nine more.

Investigation by prosecutors in Palermo shed new light on the trafficking operations. Often, refugees who already have a clear idea of where they want to go in Europe are given a phone number to call as soon as they land in Sicily to connect them with the smugglers on the Italian side. In some cases they are even given a sim card.

Those migrants who do not have a plan are often recruited by members of the trafficking network operating in the reception centres who offer their help in reaching certain destinations.

Mr Lo Voi says the kind of treatment a migrant will be given depends on how much they are willing to spend for each portion of the trip. "If someone wants to go from Milan to Sweden or the UK in a car, instead of a bus, they will have to pay more," he says. The entire journey generally costs between €4,000 and €6,000, he adds.

Mr Lo Voi, who was appointed to the job of top prosecutor in Palermo in December last year, spent most of the 1980s and 1990s pursuing the Mafia as a more junior prosecutor, working closely with Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the anti-mafia judges assassinated in 1992.

"Cosa Nostra, our Sicilian mafia, has a precise structure and clear objectives which are to go wherever there is money to be made illegally - from drugs to extortion to public contracts to gaming. But the human traffickers are only concentrated on one activity," Mr Lo Voi says.

There are a number of specific challenges in pursuing the smugglers, he says. The first is linguistic. "It seems silly but we need to find reliable interpreters to translate the intercepted phone calls - often they are in very particular dialects," Mr Lo Voi points out. The second is related to the fact that many of the witnesses to crimes, including those committed at sea, are migrants themselves. They might disappear from one moment to the next, since most are free to move around once they arrive in Italy and have been identified.

"We can't keep them here in any way. So even if they made a statement to police, it won't be admissible in court unless it is also made in front of a judge, and if the defendant has already been charged, also in front of their lawyer," Mr Lo Voi says.

On the other hand, he says, members of the human trafficking network, especially those in Libya, are much less careful about speaking on the phone, so wiretaps can be extremely effective. Mr Lo Voi says more cells operating in Italy are likely to be unearthed.

In a separate case last week, his inquiries based on survivors' accounts led to the arrest of a group of 15 Muslim migrants suspected of throwing at least nine Christians overboard to their deaths after a sectarian dispute on one boat. "I have been spending a lot more time on all this recently," he adds.

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