THE NEW YORK TIMES: The immigrants had been working as fruit pickers in southern Italy, the authorities said, apparently as part of a system of criminal labor trafficking.
The brutal killing of four immigrant workers who were burned alive in a vehicle this week has Italian officials struggling to confront rampant labor exploitation by criminal gangs that have infiltrated Italy’s agricultural industry.
The killings on Monday at a gas station in Calabria, in southern Italy, were caught on camera, and the video has shocked Italians and drawn the attention of national officials all the way up to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Surveillance footage showed two people dousing a vehicle with gasoline and blocking the doors as the vehicle and its passengers burned. One person managed to escape the vehicle and has been speaking to Italian news media about the harrowing event.
Mohammad Taj Alamyar, 35, who is originally from Afghanistan, told investigators that he and the four others, who were from Afghanistan and Pakistan, had been working on the region’s strawberry harvests. He said they had asked the men who had arranged their work and accommodations, and who were driving them back from a shift on a farm after work, about wages that had been withheld, prompting the violent response. » | Ephrat Livni and Josephine de La Bruyère | Wednesday, June 3, 2026
