• Genoa, docks Saudi cargo with a load of weapons
  • In Genoa, the Bahri Yambu freighter transporting weapons to Saudi Arabia: unions and dockers protest

Share

20 February 2020While the Libyan situation is complicated by Fayez al-Sarraj who leaves the Geneva talks due to the new attacks by General Khalifa Haftar, in Genoa the prosecutor's office arrested the commander of the Bana, the Lebanese freighter suspected of being at the center of a suspected arms trade between Turkey and Libya.

Joussef Tartoussi, Lebanese, 55 years old, ended up in the cell. He is accused of international arms trafficking in competition with subjects to be identified and also with Turkish military. The ship has been seized since February 3 in the Genoese port where it had arrived to load radiated cars to be transferred to North Africa. The investigation of the Genoese prosecutor's office started from the declarations of a cargo officer who said he had seen crawlers and weapons in the hold monitored by Turkish soldiers.

The seafarer now lives in a protected location after asking for political asylum. The officer has already been heard several times by investigators from Digos, the border police and the harbor master's office, coordinated by the prosecutors of the Dda Marco Zocco and Maria Chiara Paolucci. The man said that the freighter would transport vehicles equipped with radar and jeeps with anti-tank guns, but also machine guns, cannons and rockets. The loading of armaments, in violation of the ceasefire, would have been made in the Turkish port of Mersin with an unexpected deviation from the route.

The seafarer also revealed that the Turkish military, some perhaps of the secret services, would have told the crew to lie about the stop in Libya: that stopover would have been "suggested" to him, was due to a failure. The cargo trips would have been at least three. The war material embarked in the Turkish port would have been unloaded in Tripoli. The investigators found traces of the passage of the tanks on board the container ship. On the cargo, said, the ship of the mysteries, in order not to be identified, had been discovered, the radar system would have been turned off making the boat a "ghost ship".

For this reason, the investigators had immediately seized the black box and all the electronic equipment to accurately reconstruct the movements. On 30 January the Bana had been intercepted by the French navy which had confirmed that the ship was escorted by two Turkish frigates. French President Macron accused Turkish leader Erdogan of violating the embargo. Media close to General Haftar had claimed that those armaments were intended for al Sarraj.