Migrant Farm Workers Set Ablaze in Italy; Four Dead, Spotlight on 'Modern Slavery'

Five migrant farm workers were set on fire — four of them fatally — in an assault by their overseers this week, focusing a spotlight on Italy’s illegal agricultural labor system.

"We are facing forms of modern slavery that cannot be tolerated," regional agriculture commissioner Gianluca Gallo said after the deaths, while Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wrote on X that "Italy does not retreat in the face of violence and barbarity."

The victims of Tuesday’s attack — four Afghans and a Pakistani — had been working under poor conditions and low wages on a strawberry farm in Calabria in southern Italy, a practice commonly referred to as caporalato.

The migrants rebelled against their handlers after they did not receive their pay for weeks and the trafficker demanded transport money. CCTV footage of the attack shows two men locking the workers in a van, and then setting it on fire at a gas station.

"That's why they set fire to the car. To punish us," the sole survivor of the attack told Corriere della Sera. "They wanted to kill us all."

Police have arrested two suspects, named as Safeer Ahmed and Ali Raza, in connection with the crime.

Italy's caporalato system provides cheap, illegal labor for farms in southern Italy.

Traffickers often recruit vulnerable migrants, paying them low wages and exposing them to inhumane working conditions. Based on research by the Rizzotto foundation, in 2022 around 430,000 farm workers were victims of caporalato and 56 percent of Italian farm workers were "partially or completely illegal."