Two Italians possibly killed in Libya

(ANSA) - Rome, March 3 - The foreign ministry said Thursday that two of a group of four Italians kidnapped in Libya last year may have been killed in a shooting. "As regards the publication of some images of victims of a shooting in the region of Sabratha in Libya, apparently traceable to westerners, the foreign ministry communicates that those images, with the bodies still unavailable, could be two of the four Italian employees of the Bonatti construction firm kidnapped in July 2015," the ministry said in a statement. It named the possible victims as Fausto Piano and Salvatore Failla. The ministry said it is verifying the situation, while stressing that this was difficult without the bodies, and that it has informed the families.
    The two Italians were being held prisoner by ISIS and are said to have been killed on the outskirts of Sabratha while being moved, judicial sources said on Thursday. The convoy they were travelling in came under attack by a militia group and all the passengers were killed, the sources said. The bodies were recovered by the militias, they said.
    A Libyan witness who is in Tunis after leaving Sabratha, however, told ANSA Thursday that two Italians "were used as human shields" by ISIS jidahists. The witness said that the two were killed "in clashes" with local militias on Wednesday in the south of the city, in the area of Surman.
    Libyan medical sources had previously said that at least seven people were killed on an attack by local militias on an ISIS hideout in the Sabratha area, while two jihadists, a Syrian and a Tunisian, were captured and three others escaped.
    Piano and Failla were taken captive along with Gino Pollicardo and Filippo Calcagno, who also work for Parma-based oilfield construction and maintenance company Bonatti.
    They were captured in the area of Mellitah, in western Libya some 60km from Tripoli, near to a facility of the Mellitah Oil Gas Company, a partner of Italian oil-and-gas company Eni oil and gas company.
    The Italian intelligence services had believed that the abductions were carried out by criminal militias seeking a ransom. "I spoke to Salvatore Failla this morning, she is a devastated woman who requests that her pain be respected," said Francesco Caroleo Grimaldi, a lawyer representing the Failla family.
    "There is absolutely no certainty that her husband is one of the dead Italians and for this reason she is going through infinite anxiety". A family member of Pollicardo, a 55-year-old from Monterosso, near La Spezia, said that "we know nothing, apart from what we have managed to glean from the media over the last few hours. We hope for the best". Renato Brunetta, the Lower House whip for Silvio Berlusconi's opposition centre-right Forza Italia (FI) party, and Lia Quartapelle, a lawmaker for Premier Matteo Renzi's Democratic Party (PD), both requested that the government report to parliament shortly on the reports and on the situation in the chaos-hit North African country.
    Northern League leader Matteo Salvini told a House press conference after the reports the two Italians had been killed that "Renzi has blood on his hands in Libya as in Italy. In Italy he roots for and frees criminals, he is an accomplice of international terrorism on immigration." He went on that while the reports of the two slain Italians "are arriving from Libya, (President Sergio) Mattarella boasts Italy is in the vanguard (for welcoming migrants). Let's hope the news is unfounded".