The Mysterious Death of Ilaria Alpi
Part IV
 
 

It's late in the evening when I leave Duale's office. A light mist falling on Rome. I'm buzzed from the champagne and everything seems to be glittering. I decide to walk for a bit through the city, but then I recall that at one point during the interview Duale looked at me and said, "these people will kill to stop the truth from coming out." I gaze at the lights on the piazza. This is Rome. Europe. It's not Mogadishu. I decide to take a cab back to my hotel.

The headquarters of RAI just outside of Rome has all the charm of a maximum security prison. A series rectangular concrete structures are surrounded by high, electrified, barbed wire fence. Along one of those fences, on the outside, is a street called via Ilaria Alpi.

Ilaria worked at RAI-3, in the news division, which is known as Tg3 (Telegiornale 3). It was her dream job. Each of Italy's television stations has a political heritage. Raiuno, Raidue and Raitre, were controlled at one time by the Christian Democrats, the Socialists and the Communists respectively. Raitre was the smallest with the fewest resources. In 1987 a man named Sandro Curzi was put in charge of Tg3. Curzi was a well known leftist commentator in Italy and something of a hero to Ilaria. He wanted to build Tg3 as a more even-handed professional news organization, an organization made up of young aggressive reporters who would do with their legs what the station didn't have the money to do.

Curzi told me that he thought most Italian journalists were lazy and cowardly, that they practiced Grand Hotel journalism when they were abroad, and were satisfied to read wire copy when they were home. Ilaria was everything that Curzi wanted in a reporter. He had left Tg3 by the time she went to Somalia, but the new directors of the organization maintained the high opinion they had of Ilaria. Her life and death are still a palpable presence in the halls of Tg3. Her colleagues will drop anything to spend some time talking about her.

One of RAI's journalists, Maurizio Torrealta is writing a book about Ilaria's case. Like her parents, he believes that the key is in the final interview with King Kong. And he thinks it has something to do with the fishing boats that were hijacked off the coast of Bosasso.

When I met Torrealta he was carrying fat books full of official testimony about the Ilaria Alpi case and the abuse and torture cases. In part of that testimony, General Fiore, Italy's last commander in Somalia says that his staff had plans for a military intervention to recapture the fishing boats. We both agree that this attention to some hijacked boats was strange; boats were hijacked all the time off the Somali coast.

The faction leaders who controlled Bosasso had an arrangement with the local militia. In exchange for their "defense" of territorial fishing waters they are allowed to make their own deals and demands with the companies operating the hijacked boats. At the time, King Kong was negotiating the ransom that would be paid for the ship.

Torrealta went back to interview King Kong recently and asked him if he was afraid to talk about the situation with the fishing boat. Yes, he answered. "Because I know that in general, those companies involved in the fishing industry are also involved in other activities - especially those with Italian interests," he said. Torrealta asks King Kong if he told Ilaria anything specific. King Kong hesitates; then says "I can't say.....I don't know."

Torrealta pressed him harder: Is it possible Ilaria was killed because she knew there were arms aboard that ship?

This time King Kong answers, "It is quite possible, because it is evident those ships carried military equipment for different factions involved in the civil war."

After Ilaria and Miran's death, some of their colleagues came to the Sahafi Hotel and took her things away. They packed her TV equipment and her notebooks. They took cash out of her duffel to pay the hotel bill. An inventory of her possessions was taken onboard the Italian naval vessel, the Garibaldi. That inventory included all of her notebooks, but not her missing camera. Then her body was helicoptered back to the American morgue in Mogadishu, which had refrigerators.

The following morning a brief ceremony took place. The metal caskets were draped with Italian flags; they received the military honors in the presence of the Italian ambassador, the military chaplain, General Fiore and other officers. The bodies were flown on a G-222 transport plane to Luxor. In Luxor the coffins were switched to a DC-9 sent by the Italian government and proceeded to Rome.

Sandro Curzi and others who knew Ilaria's work habits said that she was a scrupulous note-taker. Somewhere between Luxor and Rome the notebooks were taken. On board the plane were members of the Italian military, journalists from Tg3, RAI's general manager, Italian secret service, and members of the diplomatic corps. None of those people was ever interrogated. Things, after all, do get lost.

The last thing that Georgio Alpi said to me when I left his apartment was that he now suspected Giancarlo Marrocchino was somehow behind his daughter's death. Back home in New York, I watch Carlos' video over and over again of Giancarlo supervising the extraction of Ilaria's and Miran's bodies from the Toyota pickup. He was the first person on the scene, which is not surprising. North Mogadishu was his turf. And it's also not surprising that he looks unruffled. Death was a way of life in Mogadishu. Then Giancarlo says to the camera, "They were somewhere they shouldn't have been." And I wonder if I'm listening to Giancarlo, the protector of Italian journalists commenting that Ilaria should have been using his bodyguards and cars, or if I'm listening to Giancarlo the gunrunner saying that Ilaria shouldn't have been asking questions about fishing boats in Bosasso. Suddenly I'm aware that this particular street in Mogadishu never seemed that dangerous to me. I had driven down it dozens of times before and never given it a second thought. I returned the day after Ilaria's death, and many times after, feeling perfectly safe and in control.