Punjab youth's Italian dream & homecoming that'll never be

Aditi Tandon

New Delhi, August 22

It was not Tony’s time to die. The 21-year-old had no idea of the fate that awaited him when he bid farewell to his family in Punjab and set out this February to live an Italian dream.

Tony was part of a group of youngsters from Punjab and Haryana promised a job in Italy, but sold off by Dubai-based agents to Libyan traffickers who forced them into unpaid work and kept them in subhuman conditions until 17 of them escaped. Tony was not among the lucky ones.

Punjab boy Tony, all of 21, has emerged as the sole casualty of the Italian dream scores of young Indians wanted to live but couldn’t; Tony’s family is now going through agonising wait for their ward’s body

In early May, his father, a daily wager in Punjab’s Mohali, received the tragic news of Tony’s death. Since then, the family has remained in an agonising wait to receive their ward’s mortal remains. “There is no clarity on when the body will be repatriated. It has been lying in a mortuary in Benghazi since May,” Tony’s uncle Brij Lal told The Tribune today, narrating the sequence of events that snuffed out a young life.

For many days after he landed in Dubai en route Italy, there was no news of Tony even though the identities of 17 Indian boys who escaped the Libyan mafia began to get established with help from the Indian Mission in Tunis and a team of Punjab Rajya Sabha MP Vikramjit Sahney, who aided the return of the boys this Sunday.

“We learnt much later that while escaping the Libyan mafia, Tony had separated from the Indian group and ended up with some Pakistani boys in an under-construction building in Benghazi. The boys escaped when the building was raided by the mafia one day. We heard Tony smashed his head trying to jump from a seven feet high window. He was left behind and later died,” says Brij Lal, who has been in touch with the Ministry of External Affairs for bringing back Tony’s body.

The family recalls how even the identification of the body was a Herculean task with the Indian Embassy in Tunis located nearly 1,500 km from Benghazi, where the body was lying. Only recently did the physical identification happen and formalities were completed for getting the body back.

The distraught family, meanwhile, curses the day they put their only son’s life in the hands of a Dubai-based agent. “Kamal Rana is the agent who dealt with the Indian group that was promised a job in Italy, but sent to Egypt via sea route and finally sold off to the Libyan mafia. We have learnt there may be more Indian boys still trapped in Libya. We are in touch with at least one of them who is in Benghazi,” says Gurdeep, Sahney’s team member who was at the Delhi airport on Sunday providing help to the 17 returnees from Libya.

Tony’s family too was at the airport, but not to receive him. Another of their relatives was part of the group that was lucky to have a homecoming — one that Tony will never have.