April 15, 2011
Hamas Says It Found Body of Italian Activist
By FARES AKRAM
GAZA — The Hamas group that rules Gaza said early on Friday that it had found the body of a pro-Palestinian Italian activist a day after a radical, Al Qaeda-inspired Islamic organization said it kidnapped him to press demands for the release of its imprisoned leader.
The group that claimed the abduction, known as Tawhid and Jihad, had threatened to execute the Italian unless Hamas released the leader by 5 p.m. on Friday. But Palestinian officials said Hamas police officers stormed a house where the man was being held and found his body after a clash with his kidnappers. The police officials said he had been hanged, The Associated Press reported.
According to a friend who was in touch with him by e-mail, the Italian, Vittorio Arrigoni, was abducted on the day he planned to leave Gaza complaining of exhaustion. “I am very tense, exhausted, if they don’t kill anyone in the next 24 hours, I am getting out Thursday. Your V.,” he wrote on Monday to a friend in Italy, Daniela Loffreda, Ms. Loffreda said in a telephone interview.
He had been thinking of returning to Italy for some time for family and health reasons but had stayed as the situation in Gaza worsened in recent weeks. “Morally, he just couldn’t leave,” Ms. Loffreda said. The Tawhid and Jihad group had released a video on Thursday that described the captive as “Victor, an Italian journalist” and called for the release of its supporters and other global jihadists.
The International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian activist organization with foreign volunteers in the West Bank and Gaza, had said Mr. Arrigoni, 36, was one of the movement’s activists in Gaza. Anna Stevens, a representative of the Palestinian-led movement in the West Bank city of Ramallah, said by telephone Thursday that Mr. Arrigoni was the man in the video, and that the movement’s contacts in Gaza confirmed that he had been kidnapped.
The Gaza leader of Tawhid and Jihad, Hisham Saidani, was arrested by Hamas’s forces in March.
The abduction was the first kidnapping of a foreigner in Gaza since Hamas, an Islamic militant group, took control of the territory in June 2007. It was likely to embarrass Hamas, which has prided itself on restoring security and ending years of armed chaos in Gaza.
The video, similar to those released by extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan, showed Mr. Arrigoni blindfolded and being held roughly by the hair. Only the outstretched arm of the hidden captor was visible. Mr. Arrigoni was a familiar face in Gaza, where he was better known as Victor. Mr. Arrigoni arrived in Gaza in 2009 on a boat with 40 other activists from the Free Gaza Movement who sailed here to protest a blockade imposed by Israel with Egyptian help. Mr. Arrigoni had been an active participant in demonstrations and rallies against the blockade. The restrictions on the entry of goods overland have eased in recent months, but a strict naval blockade remains in force.
Mr. Arrigoni was a native of Bulciago, a small town near Lake Como north of Milan. He wrote occasionally for the Italian left-wing daily Il Manifesto, which also had a blog, ’Guerilla Radio, to which he filed dispatches from Gaza. Luigi Ripamonti, the deputy mayor of Bulciago, said that Mr. Arrigoni had been an activist from an early age and had worked in Eastern Europe and Africa before embracing the Palestinian cause.
“He was a kid who always helped others,” Mr. Ripamonti told Italy’s Sky 24 Television. He added, “Today we lose an Italian citizen, a citizen of Bulciago, and also a Palestinian citizen, because he had married Palestine.” Mr. Arrigoni’s mother Egidia Beretta is the mayor of Bulciago.
" He has never mixed with powerful people," said Ms. Beretta said in an interview to Italy’s Sky Television. "He lived in an apartment block on the harbor, he used to tell me that at times he could see the Israeli boats from the distance."
Mr. Arrigoni started traveling the world as soon as he finished college and arrived for the first time in Israel and Palestine in 2002, almost by chance, Ms. Beretta told the Italian news agency ANSA.
A video of Mr. Arrigoni from his blog broadcast on Italian television showed him saying, “I don’t believe in borders, in barriers, in flags. I think that we all belong, independent of latitude and longitude, to the same family, the human family.”
In a statement, the Italian Foreign Ministry said it “condemned, in the strongest terms, the cowardly and irrational gesture of violence carried out by extremists indifferent to the value of human life.” It described Mr. Arrigoni as “an innocent person who for some time had been living in that area and following it up close in order to report, with strong personal conviction, the situation of Palestinians in the Gaza strip.”
In a video on YouTube, Mr. Arrigoni said he came from a family of partisans. “My maternal grandparents fought and died against the occupation, another occupation, the Nazi occupation of Italy,” he said.
“Probably for this reason it’s in my blood, my DNA, to push and struggle for freedom and human rights,” he added.
In his last blog post, dated Wednesday , Mr. Arrigoni wrote that four workers had been killed on Tuesday in a tunnel underneath the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. “These tunnels are used to transfer necessary goods that have allowed the survival of the population of Gaza, strangled for four years by the criminal Israeli occupation,” he wrote. The post showed a photo of a man bringing a goat through a tunnel.
According to Ms. Loffreda, Mr. Arrigoni felt that “he had to document what was going on” in Gaza. “I don’t think anyone was more devoted to this cause,” she said of his online chronicles which had some 9,000 followers.
The last foreigner kidnapped in Gaza was Alan Johnston, a BBC Gaza correspondent who was captured in March 2007 and held for 114 days. He was released without violence after negotiations between Hamas and his kidnappers, who belonged to a shadowy radical group calling itself the Army of Islam.
Hamas, which won parliamentary elections in 2006, is itself designated as a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and the European Union. It has cracked down on smaller, more radical Islamic groups in Gaza since it seized control of the area after a brief, factional war against Fatah, its secularist rival.
In a statement released hours before Hamas announced the death of the captured man, the Italian Foreign Ministry said that it had been carrying out “the appropriate steps for every intervention to protect our citizen.”
Hamas officials said in a statement that the house that was stormed Friday morning belonged to a member of the group that released the video. The officials said one suspect had been arrested. The A.P. reported that a policeman said four people had been arrested in another location in connection with the abduction.
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Rachel Donadio, Elisabetta Povoledo and Gaia Pianigiani from Rome.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/wo...st/16gaza.html
Pro-Palestinian ISMer (ISM generally fill the ranks of Western useful idiots in Palestine) is abducted by radical group and hung.
Reply With Quote