Mohammad Taj Alamyar repeatedly elbows the window. The glass gives way. As the minivan catches fire, he manages to drag himself out through the rear hatch. The burns on his arms may not be permanent. The memory of those moments will. He will be the only survivor.
The other four die inside. Someone had locked the doors, doused the vehicle in fuel and set it alight. The deceased were Amin Fazal Khogjani (28); Ullah Ismat Qiemi (19); Safi Iyad (27); and Waseem Khan (29). They had come from Pakistan and Afghanistan. They were Pashtun.
It was 1 June. A morning like many others. At dawn, they climbed into the van bound for the strawberry fields of Scanzano Jonico. They had done the same almost every day since late April, with backpacks on their shoulders and shoes already caked with soil. They travelled from a first-floor flat on Via Gramsci in Villapiana along State Road 106, the long artery that runs through Calabria’s upper Ionian coast.
They never came back. Their lives ended on the forecourt of a petrol station.
Like many other seasonal workers in the area, they lived in cramped conditions: as many as ten men in two rooms with mattresses on the floor and few pieces of furniture. They left before dawn and returned in the afternoon after spending hours in the fields. They often travelled in minivans organised by caporali, the illegal labour brokers who control transport, housing, and access to work. Their story ended inside one of those vans.
A small community
Together, they formed a small community. Always searching for work, they had first been in Sardinia, where they had obtained residence permits, before moving to the area between Basilicata and Calabria — one of Italy’s key agricultural districts.
Not only strawberries grow there, but olives, citrus fruit, nectarines and even exotic fruit and rice. Thousands of farms work closely with large retailers across Italy and abroad. From those fields come the plastic trays of spring fruit and the clementines that land on Italian family tables in December. A turnover worth millions of euros which, for those who pick the fruit, often means a handful of coins extracted from a reluctant gangmaster.
It is a geography of labour that descends along the Ionian coast: Bernalda, Metaponto, Policoro, Pisticci, Amendolara, Sibari, Schiavonea.
Inside the Villapiana flat where the men lived, investigators found clear traces of their daily existence: mattresses on the floor, documents, a few personal belongings and an striking number of mud-covered shoes. The rent, about €500 a month, was split among them and deducted directly from their wages.
Exploitation and the supply chain
Every morning the labourers left to work in the countryside, harvesting strawberries for a farm in Scanzano. The job had begun on 20 April. The agreement was €45 a day.
«But since we started that work, they had never given us even €1,» the survivor, Mohammad Taj Alamyar, told TgR Calabria. «In the end, they gave us the house but no pay. They also demanded €5 a day for the journey to work.»
From Alamyar’s words emerges the outline of a life shaped by precarity and exploitation: €45 a day, minus rent, transport and expenses. The final balance: barely more than zero.
Among the issues investigators must establish is whether the workers’ demand for a regular contract, a different wage, or their refusal to accept further deductions played a role in what happened.
«They wanted a contract,» Taj Alamyar said, referring to the men who died in the blaze.
They had certainly argued until the morning of the killing, even violently. And the gangmasters, according to the emerging reconstruction, decided to teach them a lesson. A final one.
Reconstructing the agricultural chain
Here the contradictions begin.
The owner of the farm where the men worked had employed them to pick strawberries — temporary labour, usually paid by the day and often formalised through a regular hiring procedure. The farm had hired all of them, including the alleged gangmasters, and says it paid each worker by bank transfer.
No one, for now, can disprove that. But then what role did the gangmasters play?
It is worth looking inside the company: modern, efficient, far removed from the old image of an archaic southern agricultural economy. It has a turnover in the millions, a website selling strawberries and exotic fruit directly, and contracts with major supermarket groups. Its produce reaches shelves both under its own name and as private label — hidden behind the brand of the retail chain.
The relationship with large-scale retail is made clear in several interviews. Buy Italian fruit. There is no demand for higher compensation, only fear of competition from abroad, led by Greece and Spain.
The day of the killing
There had been an initial argument that morning. The dispute then continued on the journey back. Taj Alamyar said the workers had rebelled against the exploitation they were being subjected to.
According to the Castrovillari public prosecutor’s office, the plan may have been premeditated. One of the elements considered crucial concerns the minivan’s sliding door: it had allegedly been made unusable from the outside, with the handle broken, trapping those inside as the flames spread rapidly.
The position of the bodies, all found in the front section of the vehicle, and the movement of the van captured by surveillance cameras reportedly led investigators to believe the men had made a desperate attempt to free themselves, using their arms and legs.
The Castrovillari prosecutor’s office has included caporalato among the lines of inquiry. The legal reference is Article 603-bis of the Italian criminal code, reformulated by Law 199 of 2016, which covers illegal labour intermediation and labour exploitation.
Investigators are trying to establish whether a network built around agricultural labour lay behind the fire. State Road 106 links the crime scene to the route along which workers move between farms, lodgings and transit points across the upper Ionian area of Cosenza province.
The arrests and the motive
Two Pakistani citizens, both aged 31, have been detained in connection with the killings. They are alleged to have been the gangmasters who managed transport and accommodation for the labourers, demanding money from men to whom they had never paid a wage.
Mohammad Taj Alamyar repeats it obsessively: «It is mafia, mafia… They are Pakistani mafiosi.»
The survivor spoke of a “Pakistani mafia”, referring to a gangmastering network run by fellow nationals — a mechanism that, according to several investigations in recent years, has taken root between Basilicata and Calabria by exploiting the vulnerability of migrant workers.
But that vulnerability must be understood carefully, to avoid slipping into an ethnic essentialism that sees Asian workers as submissive people incapable of claiming their rights.
When the conditions exist, as is happening in the textile district of Prato, workers of Pakistani origin have been at the heart of union organising that is bringing rights into a sector where exploitation was, if anything, even worse than in agriculture.
And how can one forget the case of Adnan Siddique? He, too, was of Pakistani origin. He died after denouncing a clan of fellow nationals who supplied exploited labourers to farmers in the province of Caltanissetta.
This vulnerability is produced by a system of immigration laws designed precisely to create blackmailable workers. Politics has turned a deaf ear to this. No government has ever truly taken responsibility for the issue.
To obtain documents, people who arrive in Italy usually go through the asylum system. It is a long bureaucratic process that often ends in refusal. Even for those coming from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan — not exactly a safe country.
The answer, even for them, is often a temporary piece of paper, designed to push people into blackmailable work: perhaps as a rider, perhaps as a farm labourer. Today the two paths are equivalent. What makes the difference is word of mouth — whether it carries you to the city or to the countryside.
