Two Italian hostages, Fausto Piano
and Salvatore Failla, workers for an oilfield construction firm
abducted in July 2015, were killed in unclear circumstances in
Libya Thursday.
According to one report, they were killed by government
loyalists while being moved by a rival militia.
According to another report, they were killed while being
used as human shields during a government attack on an ISIS
hide-out.
It was said to be unsure, however, that they were being
held by ISIS, according to the head of the COPASIR parliamentary
intelligence oversight committee, Giacomo Stucchi.
The fate of two other employees of the Bonatti company was
also unclear most of the day until Intelligence Undersecretary
Marco Minniti testified to COPASIR that the pair, Filippo
Calcagno and Gino Pollicardo, were still alive.
Calcagno and Pollicardo were captured along with Failla
and Piano near a Mellitah Oil Gas Company facility in western
Libya, some 60 kms from Tripoli, last summer.
Piano and Failla were likely not killed as a reprisal for
Italy's upcoming role, if requested by Libya, in leading an
international coalition in the north African country, officials
said.
The Italian government's priority is now to save Calcagno
and Pollicardo, the head of COPASIR, Stucchi, said after Minniti
reported to the panel.
He said "a rigorous silence must be observed on such a
delicate situation".
The pair killed "have been recognised using photographic
techniques, we hope their bodies will soon be returned to
Italy", said Stucchi, who said militias had been trying to
regain their positions after last month's US airstrikes in the
area.
He also said Italian intelligence services were present in
in Libya, though not necessarily in the area where the fatal
shoot-out took place.
A ransom will likely not be demanded, Stucchi added.
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, Failla, Pollicardo and Calcagno all worked for the
Parma-based oilfield construction and maintenance company
Bonatti.
They were captured near 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.
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".
Former premier Silvio Berlusconi said there was always the
risk of victims if "hasty" action was taken.
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