Italian family kidnapped in the Malian desert

They were kidnapped by four bandits in Mali: their wife, husband and son had moved a few years ago. Jehovah’s Witnesses, possibly victims of a jihadist group

ROME. They went to pick them up at home in the middle of the night. It seems there were four of them, aboard a Toyota. Armed, but they didn’t have to fire a shot. They took the 64-year-old Rocco Langone, his wife Donatella, 62, and their son Giovanni, 43, all originally from Potenza but residing in the Milanese area for years. They also loaded another man into the car, a citizen of Togo. Then they fled to the desert. In the village just outside the town of Koutiala, 270 kilometers from Bamako, the capital of Mali, no one has seen anything. Or, at least, it was difficult to find witnesses. The Italian family has lived there for several years, within a community of Jehovah’s Witnesses: perfectly integrated, so much so that they choose to use local names and the surname Koulibaly. In any case, they are not registered in Aire, the registry of Italians residing abroad. According to Malian sources, they moved to that corner of Africa to open a church, or rather a “Kingdom hall”. But, if it were true, it is not a project initiated by the Christian Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Italy, which has made it known that it does not have “missionaries sent to that country” and that the three are in Mali “for personal reasons”.

Moreover, the area where the kidnapping took place, near the border with Burkina Faso, is considered very dangerous, with a very strong presence of jihadist militiamen. And the situation became even more complicated after the downsizing of the “Barkhane” counter-terrorism operation, carried out by the French armed forces in the Sahel.

The first suspect in the blitz the day before last night is the Jnim (Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin) or Gsim, a support group for Islam and Muslims, a paramilitary organization of Salafi ideology considered the official branch of al-Qaeda in Mali. It was they who kidnapped, more than a year ago, the French journalist Olivier Dubois, a collaborator of Liberation, still a prisoner. On March 13, a video appeared on social networks in which the man addresses his relatives and the government of Paris, so that they are committed to his release. In the past, however, other Italians have also been victims of kidnappings in the region.

The Italian precedents

In September 2018 it was the turn of Father Pier Luigi Maccalli, Cremonese priest of the Society of African Missions: kidnapped while he was in Niger, but then released in Mali two years later, in October 2020. Together with another Italian, Nicola Chiacchio, who was instead kidnapped in Mali in February 2019, while traveling by bicycle. The two said they were held prisoner both in the desert areas of Mali and in the rocky area to the north, by three different jihadist groups, however linked to the al-Qaeda galaxy. With them, for a certain period there were the Paduan Luca Tacchetta and the Canadian girlfriend Edith Blais. Kidnapped in December 2018 in Burkina Faso, they then managed to escape in March 2020. The hope is that a positive ending will soon be reached for the Langone family as well.

The Farnesina made it known that “the Crisis Unit of the Foreign Ministry is carrying out the necessary checks and investigations” and that “Minister Di Maio is personally following the evolution of the affair”. Of course, relations with the Malian authorities are not simple, given that the African country is governed by a military junta, after two coups, in 2020 and 2021. For about ten years it has been a sort of black hole of terrorism Islamic and has now entered the orbit of Russia, so much so that the Bamako authorities have requested and obtained the support of the Russian army mercenaries “Wagner ”to curb the jihadist advance. It so happens that yesterday the foreign minister of Mali, Abdoulaye Diop, was in Moscow to meet with his Russian counterpart Serghei Lavrov, who did not fail to underline that in Mali “the security situation remains extremely difficult“