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Torturing migrants gets Somali man life sentence in Italy

A Somali man who tortured dozens of his compatriots and other migrants in a Libyan camp was sentenced to life in prison by an Italian court on Tuesday.

Published: 10 October 2017 16:52 CEST

Torturing migrants gets Somali man life sentence in Italy

The Somali man who tortured dozens of his compatriots and other migrants in a Libyan camp. Photo: Mahmud Turkia/AFP

Osman Matammud, 22, was convicted of murder and multiple counts of torture on the basis of testimony from migrants after he was recognised by chance outside a migrant centre in Milan.

Matammud, who tried to pass himself off as a regular asylum seeker, was arrested in September 2016 after being reported to authorities for using torture to extort money from migrants in a transit camp in Bani Walid, a town in the Libyan desert.

Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa often spend time in such camps while waiting for their families to pay more money to people traffickers who have promised to get them to Europe. Torture is used to speed up and sometimes increase the payments.

A total of 17 victims testified against Matammud in the Milan court, with some saying he had beaten people to death and let others die from a lack of food, water or medical treatment.

Two young women told the court he had raped them.

“Matammud was a case of someone losing all moral compass, of being overcome by a delirious sense of power as a result of having the lives of others in his hands,” lead prosecutor Marcello Tatangelo told the trial last month.

The young Somali man claimed he was just like any other migrant arriving in Italy and had been himself the victim of violent attacks in Libya.

His lawyer portrayed Matammud as being caught up in a war between rival Somali clans. “I've told the truth, I've not lied, nor have I committed any crime,” Matammud said in his final appeal.

Testimonies by the victims left a mark on the investigators. “In a 40-year career, I have never come across horror on the same level, and you have to imagine that what happened in Bani Walid is taking place in every camp,” another prosecutor, Ilda Boccassini, said in January.

Swedish Migration Agency boss admits confusing 'patchwork' of rules

In an interview with the Sydsvenskan newspaper, Ribbenvik, who will end his 24-year career at the Migration Agency in May, complained that migration legislation had become ever more complicated and confusing over the past decade as a result of a series of coalition governments where different parties have “sought to cram in all their pet issues”.

Since the refugee crisis in 2015, there has been the temporary migration law from 2016, which made temporary residency the default for asylum seekers, and then the two ‘gymnasium laws’, which he described as “half-amnesties”.

The two laws opened the way for people who had come to Sweden as unaccompanied child asylum seekers and whose asylum application had been rejected to stay if they finished upper secondary school and got a job.

Now, Ribbenvik worried, a new barrage of new laws from the three-party right wing government and their far-right backers, the Sweden Democrats, risked making the system even more complicated.

“The legislation is starting to become too complicated for anyone to understand. It’s absolutely impossible to explain in the media, because you don’t have the time,” he told the newspaper. “We need to have our absolutely smartest migration people in our legal unit to work everything out.”

When the new government announced its intention to phase out permanent residency, the agency’s phones were deluged with worried calls from permanent residency holders.

Ribbenvik summarised the message to Sydsvenskan as: “OK, you can stay… no, you can’t stay.”

“I have a great amount of understanding for the confusion this has caused,” he said. “Debate articles attack the Migration Agency, and we’re an easy target. But this is a consequence of the legislation there has been in recent years.”

After Sweden’s government announced that Ribbenvik’s contract was not going to be extended, Björn Söder, a Sweden Democrat MP and member of the parliament’s defence committee, celebrated the decision.

“Time to tidy up Agency Sweden,” Söder wrote on Twitter. “Kick the asylum activists out of the agency.”

In the Sydsvenskan interview, Ribbenvik characterised himself as a “proud bureaucrat”, who was apolitical and saw his role as enacting the orders of politicians in the best way possible. He didn’t join the agency because of a passion for immigration issues, but because he needed a part-time job while he finished his law degree, he said.

“I read now that I’m a Director-General appointed by the Social Democrats. So am I going to be politicised now, right at the end? Because I never have been before.”

Very often, he said, attacks like Söder’s “say nothing about the accused, but a lot about the accuser”.

He did say, however, tell the newspaper that he had been surprised by how quickly the debate had shifted in Sweden from the days when most of the criticism the agency received came from those wanting more liberal treatment for asylum seekers to today, when they are accused of being too lenient.

“As someone who’s worked here for 24 years, I’m stunned over how the debate has shifted in recent months, when the whole time I’ve been here, it’s been the opposite: ‘why do you analyse people’s language, why do you do age assessments?’. We’ve always been criticised from the other direction.”

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