Procida does not forget! 31 years after the Lucina massacre, a wound still open

Time, they say, is the best doctor. But there are wounds that not even time can heal. There are pains that, even if they ease, never disappear. And there are mysteries that, even if buried under years of silence and half-truths, continue to weigh like boulders on the collective memory. This is the case of the massacre of the merchant ship Lucina, which occurred on the night between July 6 and 7, 1994, and which even today, 31 years later, represents a deep scar for the island and for the entire maritime community of the Gulf of Naples.

Seven men were brutally killed on board the ship: slaughtered in their bunks, caught in their sleep, without any possibility of defense. Only one of them, perhaps having woken up suddenly, was found nearby, in a corridor. No survivors, no witnesses. Among the victims was also a son of Procida: Gerardo Esposito, an expert sailor, a man of the sea and of silence, torn from his family and his land in a way that still remains inexplicable today.

The Lucina, a merchant ship flying the Italian flag and owned by the company Sagittario di Monte di Procida, had set sail from Cagliari with a declared cargo of two thousand tons of semolina, destined for the production of couscous in North Africa. The ship, however, at the time of the massacre, had been stuck for 27 days in the Algerian port of Djendjen, without any official explanation being provided for such a long and anomalous wait.

The first mystery concerns precisely this long stop: why did a commercial ship, with a perishable cargo and no reports of technical problems, remain stuck for almost a month in a foreign port? And above all: what happened to the 600 tons of cargo that were missing upon arrival? Questions that were not answered then and that still remain unanswered today. The official version, supported by the Algerian authorities and subsequently endorsed by a lightning trial that lasted just two days, speaks of a terrorist attack by Islamic extremists. A theory that, from the beginning, has left investigators, observers and relatives of the victims perplexed. Too many elements do not add up.

Too many details seem to escape linear logic. To make the scenario even more disturbing, there are two figures who remained on the ground in Cagliari, by pure chance or perhaps not. The first is Domenico Aniello Barone, also from Monte di Procida, who for reasons never fully clarified did not board the Lucina. A choice that, in hindsight, saved his life. With him, another man also gave up boarding: Gaetano Giacomina, originally from Oristano. A name that at the time went unnoticed, but that years later was discovered to be anything but ordinary.

Giacomina, in fact, was an operative agent of the secret structure Gladio, code name G-65, with a long experience of infiltration in Algeria, one of the most unstable and violent countries of the nineties. Her presence - or rather, her absence - on board the Lucina has fueled over time hypotheses far more complex than a simple terrorist attack. In 1998, Giacomina died in mysterious circumstances on the island of Fogo, in the Cape Verde archipelago. An accident, it was said. But her body was never identified with certainty. Another dark piece in a story that seems to have been written with the ink of secret services and covert operations.

And it doesn't end there. Eight years ago, another name returned to the center of attention: Domenico Aniello Barone, the sailor who escaped the massacre, died in a shipyard in Pozzuoli, this time again in circumstances that have never been fully clarified. The causes of death remain "to be ascertained", but for the community of Monte di Procida and Procida, that disappearance reopened a wound that has never healed. Because too many coincidences, in this story, seem to be something other than simple fatalities. There are those who, over the years, have hypothesized that those 600 tons of semolina that disappeared were not semolina at all. There are those who have spoken of weapons destined for paramilitary groups, of radioactive waste to be disposed of illegally, or even of sensitive material linked to covert operations between Italy, Algeria and other Mediterranean countries. Hypotheses, of course. But none have ever been convincingly denied.

The trial in Algiers was a missed opportunity to clarify. Just two days, a sentence that many called “political”, with little evidence and no real culprit. A verdict that seemed more interested in closing the case than solving it. Since then, silence. And yet, the memory remains alive. Because Gerardo Esposito, like the other six sailors of the Lucina, is not just a victim: he is the symbol of a denied truth, of a justice that never arrived, of a State that – once again – has left its men alone in the open sea.

Today, thirty-one years later, the memory does not fade. Procida continues to ask for answers. It will continue to do so, as long as there is someone who remembers. Because the truth, even when it is inconvenient, deserves to be told. And because justice, even if late, is a duty towards those who can no longer speak.