Silvia Romano: fourth Italian hostage freed by Aise in just over a year

2020-05-09T18:18:10.456Z

With the release of Silvia Romano, four Italians abducted abroad were able to return home in just over a year thanks in particular to the action of the Aise, the external intelligence services led by General Luciano Carta. In April and May 2019 Sergio Zanotti and Alessandro Sandrini were freed respectively, kidnapped in Turkey and brought to Syria, while on March 14 Luca Tacchetto and his Canadian companion Edith Blois, who had disappeared in Burkina Faso, returned to freedom. April 5, 2019: the entrepreneur from Brescia Sergio Zanotti, was freed three years after the kidnapping in April 2016. The man, fifty-seven, had also appeared in some videos released on YouTube by his kidnappers: the last one framed him on his knees, with a thick and long beard, dressed in a light blue shirt, in front of two hooded men with machine guns in hand, in a closed environment. Previously, in another video, he was filmed among olive trees, always kneeling and under the threat of an armed man. "I was out of work, I decided to go to Turkey, in the Hatay area a few kilometers from Syria, to try to buy dinars to be resold in Europe where they have a value in the numismatic market. However, I was sold by my abusive taxi driver to some militants who narcotized me: on April 14, 2016 I woke up in a hut in the Aleppo area ", Zanotti then said. May 22, 2019. Alessandro Sandrini is freed. The 33-year-old man left on 3 October 2016 for a holiday in Adana, Turkey, a city 180 kilometers from Aleppo, Syria. For a year his news was gone, until, on 19 October 2017, he telephoned his mother to tell her that he had been kidnapped. It is the first in a series of phone calls to the mother in the following months, asking for help. The man originally from Folzano, in the Brescia area, then appears on 31 July in a video wearing an orange suit, on his knees and two hooded and armed jailers behind him. '' They will kill me, '' he said in the video released by Site, a site that monitors jihadist activities, according to which Sandrini was hostage in Syria together with the Japanese journalist Jumpei Yasud. March 14, 2020. The 31-year-old from Padua Luca Tacchetti and his Canadian girlfriend Edith Bias return to Mali. The two had been kidnapped in Burkina Faso on 15 December 2018. They had left home in Vigonza, driving an old Renault Megane, for a trip to the Sahel region for a solidarity project. The day before their disappearance they had been guests in the city of Bobo-Dioulasso of a French citizen to whom they said they were headed to the capital, Ouagadougou, to ask for a valid visa for Togo and Benin at the immigration office. But they never showed up in that office. Fifteen months later, Tacchetti and Blois were handed over to the Mali authorities by the UN Minusma force that had found them near Kidal, Mali. The two said they were kidnapped by a jihadist group who held them prisoners in camps in the Malian desert. They would then manage to escape one night when the jailers had loosened surveillance.