Italian police authorities are working in close collaboration with their Irish and European colleagues in the attempt to trace the route taken by the 13 asylum-seekers discovered in a container opened at Wexford Business Park last Saturday morning.
For Italian authorities, however, the weekend's Wexford tragedy induces an all-too-grisly sense of dΘjα vu. Because of its location, bordering on eastern Europe and on north Africa, and given also its 7,600 km coastline, Italy has long featured as a transit point in the illegal trafficking of non-EU economic migrants.
According to the Interior Ministry, last year some 66,057 illegal immigrants were expelled from Italy, either at the frontier or subsequently after illegal entry. Given that perhaps only one in 10 of would-be clandestine immigrants are apprehended, that figure alone justifies estimates putting the volume of traffic in clandestini at over half a million people per year, coming from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. The Interior Ministry also estimates Italy's population of legally resident non-EU foreigners at 1.23 million.
Tragedies of the kind which befell the immigrants discovered in Wexford are nothing new for Italian police forces.
In October last year a motorist driving to work outside Foggia in Puglia, southern Italy, discovered six bodies dumped in the middle of a small road adjacent to a major north-south autostrada.
The bodies proved to be those of Iraqi Kurds whose "minder", on discovering that his "cargo" had died from asphyxiation, simply dumped them out of his container truck to the side of the road.
Police believe would-be immigrants from Turkey and/or Iraq pay up to £1,000 for a "passage to Italy", that can take up to six months and which is handled almost exclusively by organised crime syndicates.