«I have lost a year of life that no compensation will ever be able to restore to me. I was in prison for 300 days for not having done anything, it’s not right”, These are the words of Maisoon Majidi to his lawyer immediately after the ruling of the Crotone court, presided over by judge Edoardo D’Ambrosio, which ordered the release of Maysoon Majidi, the young human rights activist of Kurdish nationality arrested on 31 December 2023 by the Financial Police with the accusation of aiding and abetting illegal immigration.
The prosecutors essentially accused her of having been part of the group of smugglers of the boat that landed on a beach north of Crotone on New Year’s Eve with 77 people on board. Accusation based essentially on the declarations of two migrants who according to them had assisted the captain of the boat in keeping the migrants at bay. Witnesses who, moreover, the public prosecution was unable to track down and listen to at the hearing.
The judges of the criminal panel were instead able to listen to the stories of four defense witnesses (husband, wife and daughter of an Iranian family and the accused’s brother) to conclude that Maysoon Majidi could not have been a smuggler, nor the captain’s aide , but a migrant like the other people on board. The testimony of the boat’s captain, Akturk Ufuk, also strengthened the defense’s case. “Maysoon – he told the judges – did nothing on the boat, zero, he was too sick: I drove the boat alone.”
Furthermore, Akturk Ufuk indicated by looking at the photos a series of people who were the real traffickers: “They were always on the phone with the traffickers in Turkey – the man explained – they gave orders, they took the phones of the other migrants”. Furthermore, the same people had been indicated by Maysoon as traffickers during the interrogations. The Court therefore accepted the request for release presented by the defender, the lawyer Giancarlo Liberati, and released the young Kurdish activist.
Orrico (M5S): “We remain confident in the final sentence”
“The release from prison of Maysoon Majidi, the Kurdish-Iranian activist accused of being a smuggler, is good news which does not, not yet, put an end to her Kafkaesque legal case, but which gives us hope in view of next November 27th when the hearing is scheduled in which a sentence could finally be reached.” This was stated by the deputy of the 5 Star Movement Anna Laura Orrico.
“Once she arrived on our shores – says Orrico – fleeing from her country of origin as a woman, activist and with a thinking head, she remained in Calabrian prisons for 10 months on the basis of equivocal testimonies, claiming her innocence from the first moment to the competent authorities. And she repeated it with conviction even during the visit I wanted to pay her when she was imprisoned in the Castrovillari prison and I found her already in poor health, having lost many kilos. His – continues the five-star exponent – is one of the many cases in which migrants, due to the repressive but ineffective policies typical of the Meloni government, just think of the Cutro Decree, who flee from hunger, wars and persecutions, remain entangled in the web of justice while the real criminals who profit from the trafficking of men, women and children get away with it. All that remains is to wait – concludes Anna Laura Orrico – for justice to be definitively pronounced, restoring, we hope definitively, freedom to this young and combative woman capable of fighting, in difficult latitudes, for human rights, for the most fragile. However, no one will ever give her back almost a year of life behind bars.”