Police on Tuesday arrested the owner
of an agricultural company that employed Satnam Singh, an
off-the-books 31-year-old farm labourer who bled out after being
dumped outside his hut with an arm severed by wrapping machinery
placed beside him on a fruit picking box at Latina south of Rome
last month.
The alleged gangmaster, Antonello Lovato, was arrested on
suspicion of causing Singh's manslaughter death.
Prosecutors said in a statement that Singh, who died of a
massive haemorrghage in a Rome hospital, "would in all
likelihood have been saved if he had been promptly assisted".
The president of the Lazio Indian community, Gurmukh Singh, said
"we weer waiting for this news, we were angry."
He said "the worst thing (Lovato) did was to leave him outside
his home instead of taking him to hospital.
"An accident can happen, but not calling for medical assistance
is unacceptable."
Singh's horrific death has spurred calls for action to stamp
out gangmastering in Italy.
The death of Singh, one of the thousands of Indian immigrants
who work the fields around Latina for slave wages and
in dire conditions, beset by gangmasters, has caused outrage
across the country.
Opposition 5-Star Movement (M5S) leader Giuseppe Conte was among
those urging Premier Giorgia Meloni to act to root out the
sometimes brutal exploitation of mainly immigrant farm workers.
Conte, a former two-time premier with contrasting
administrations, said he expected "words and strong stances from
Meloni".
He wrote on X: "You lose your arm while you're working in the
fields for four euros an hour. You're not immediately treated.
They put you in a van and they dump you like rubbish outside
your home. Beside you, a strawberry basket in which your severed
arm is left. You bleed out and die.
"It sounds like the story of a slave centuries ago. We can't
close our eyes, we can't think about making profits while
cancelling the dignity of work and the last shreds of humanity.
"If we ignore these atrocities, we will stop defending Italy and
its values.
"We are ready to do our bit in parliament against these
barbarities, which must be rooted out of the fields all over
Italy".
Meloni subseuquently said Singh was the victim of "inhuman
acts."
But her brother in law, and bigwig in her rightwing Brothers of
Italy (FdI) party, Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida,
warned against tarring all farmers with the same brush.
Lollobrigida said Singh had been killed by "a criminal".
Speaking at a press conference with Labour Minister Marina
Calderone after talks on Singh's death and gangmastering with
unions and employers, Lollobrigida said: "In these situations
it
can happen that there is a criminalisation of one of the links
in
the chain.
"It can happen, therefore, that when faced with serious episodes
like the one at Latina, all the agricultural enterprises are
criminalised.
"These deaths aren't the fault of agricultural entrepreneurs.
"They are the fault of criminals".
Gangmastering and the often violent exploitation of migrant farm
labourers is a chronic problem in Italy, especially in the
south.
Latina hosts thousands of immigrant labourers, many of them
Sikhs, working picking fruit and vegetables for the local
'agro-mafia' as well as legitimate firms.
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