In Lampedusa, it was a state-sponsored massacre: the police know the names of the perpetrators, but so far they're only arresting Roma children.

The death toll in the shipwreck the day before yesterday, a few miles off the coast of Lampedusa, is still uncertain. It never will be. Probably between 30 and 40. A massacre. Just imagine if, instead of being desperate foreigners, they had been Italians: the newspapers would be talking about nothing else, and national mourning would certainly have been declared. There was no such declaration: they came from Libya, where the traffickers are controlled by the government's friend, Osama Almasri, and they were probably all African. A few newspapers put the story on their front pages. Not all. The right-wing newspapers didn't. In our Western, and especially Italian, way of evaluating news, it's like this: 27 African deaths are worth much less than a car accident.

But then, perhaps, justice does exist. And in fact, yesterday the Agrigento prosecutor's office opened an investigation. The magistrates must have said to themselves: if there's a massacre, they need to determine whether there's guilt. Well, the guilt is crystal clear. On August 8th, five days before the shipwreck, our newspaper reported this: ENAC, an agency under Salvini's ministry, had seized the Sea Bird reconnaissance plane, which in recent years has reported the presence of hundreds and thousands of refugee boats in distress. And it enabled the rescue operations. With the plane grounded, no one, according to official sources, saw the two boats sink the day before yesterday. Had the plane been in flight, it certainly would have spotted them, and the massacre would have been avoided.

It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to determine that the plane hijacking is to blame for the massacre. On August 8th, the headline in Unità was: "There Will Be Many Dead." It wasn't a dire prophecy, it was a forewarning. There's a massacre, and there are culprits. The police know the names of the perpetrators. So far, no one is demanding legal action against them. This is also because Italy is busy hunting down Roma children. Yesterday morning, it was learned that the families of the four children who were in the car that struck and killed a 71-year-old woman a few days ago had left the camp where they were living. A large-scale police operation was launched immediately, and three of the four families were stopped at the Ventimiglia border.

The children were taken from their parents and placed in a protected community. Let's just say they were immediately subjected to punishment. Because anyone who has known children knows that being separated from their mother and father is a terrible punishment. Let's just say that under the age of 14, you can't be prosecuted, but you can be brutally punished. Fortunately, the youngest of the four children was not captured. Let's hope he survives.

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Piero Sansonetti