Sabaudia: the car of the sociology correspondent, Marco Omizzolo, destroyed

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Persons unknown damaged his car during the night. The reporter and sociologist has reported the attack. “My commitment against exploitation will continue” he told Ossigeno. He also met with the board of FNSI

Omizzolo’s vehicle was parked below his house in Sabaudia in the province of Latina. Persons unknown had slashed his tyres, had pierced the bonnet and broken a window. In addition they had scratched the right side of the vehicle and chipped the bumper. They had acted during the night between Saturday and Sunday. On the 7th March the sociologist reported the offence in the provincial station of the carabinieri of Latina who reported the incident to the Committee for Order and Public Safety for it to evaluate subsequent protection.

On the 15th March in the offices of the Latina Municipality a meeting was held between Omizzolo, the mayor of Latina, Damiano Coletta and the president of FNSI, Giuseppe Giuletti who expressed solidarity with the reporter. At the meeting there were various journalists and representatives of media organisations. Solidarity with the researcher came also from Eurispes. Magistrates are investigating to clarify and to understand what link there is between the episode and the activity of Omizzolo.

The precedents : The first time Omizzolo was subjected to an intimidation for his work as a journalist was in 2014 when the football fans of Latina exhibited a banner with the writing “pieces of shit without dignity” against him and the journalist Roberto Lessio for having reconstructed in an article in Il Manifesto the rapid rise of “Latina Calcio” which had achieved promotion to Serie A, and the political career of Pasquale Maietta, president of the football club, his interests, and the speculation underway over the project of constructing a new stadium. Maietta, a member of parliament for Forza Italia, then ended up in the middle of a criminal investigation. Ossigeno took care of Omizzolo for this affair and for another intimidation which the researcher was subjected to in August 2016 when persons unknown damaged his car (read here the precedents).

As he himself has said, the intimidation could be linked to his activity of denouncing the exploitation of foreign workers or, another hypothesis, the episode could be the work of “hooligans of the extreme right,encouraged by the electoral result obtained in the recent political elections” (read here).

Other threats because of the investigations into casual labour and the exploitation of immigrants in the fields are difficult subjects to deal with at a journalistic level because articles and investigations often lead to violent reactions from day labour gangmasters and exploiters.

Among the cases recorded by the Ossigeno Observatory for Information there is that of the reporter of La Stampa, Riccardo Coletti, threatened in Asti (Piedmont) in 2015 for having carried out – for the Torinese newspaper – an investigation into the exploitation of immigrants from eastern Europe for the grape harvest (read here).

In February 2016 Leonardo Palmisano, writer and lecturer in Sociology in the University of Bari and Yvan Sagnet, figurehead of the struggle against the caporalato of labour in Italy were threatened with anonymous telephone calls and stalking. The intimidations arrived after the publication of Ghetto Italia, a reportage edited by Fandango, on the question of casual labour , the organisation of the work of labourers, and on the living conditions under which foreign workers in the Italian countryside, from North to South, are forced to live (read here).

RDM