[Thread]
I hope you’ll take the time to read our full investigation on how #Italy sent a warship to #Libya to fight trafficking &
🇮🇹 sailors gathered a cargo of contraband + broke a UN arms embargo.
On the @nytimes with @PatrickKingsley
nytimes.com/2020/09/28/wor…
#Italy's former interior minister Matteo Salvini praised the ship Caprera after it stopped ++ than 7,000 people from reaching Europe.
There was just one problem: the #Caprera was itself smuggling contraband to #Europe.
A key piece of evidence for investigators are photos from a farewell party... Photographs shared on the ship’s WhatsApp group showed a grinning Mr. Corbisiero sitting before a large chocolate cake... Behind him were several sacks of contraband cigarettes.
By the time the #Caprera arrived in #Brindisi, the room was so full of cigarette sacks that the police officers who seized the ship could barely enter it.
The ruse was rumbled by this text: “Commander, sorry to disturb you. In these bags are those famous cartons of cigarettes.”
Here a text message sent after the ship was seized.
“I’m a bit in the poop,” one Caprera sailor, Antonio Mosca, said. “Port authorities are onboard the Caprera. We were unloading those bags with the cigarettes.”
The investigation has expanded beyond the Caprera.
Invoices show that the Caprera’s sailors purchased the cigarettes in #Libya using a method apparently developed by crew members of a second Italian ship, the #Capri, moored in #Tripoli in January 2018.
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