These days, there seems no shortage of horrors that are perpetrated upon innocent people by criminals intent on gain. Until recently one would have said that kidnapping for ransom was the most awful. With the clear threat that victims would be murdered unless money has handed over for their release, this living death was as much a torture to family and friends as it was a horror to the person whose life was on the line. But it gets worse. There are tens of thousands of people from sub-Saharan Africa who have chosen, for whatever reason, to quit their own countries and to seek a better and infinitely more prosperous life in the European Union. Their main route is across the Sahara into Libya. From there, they plan to pay for an illegal passage across the Mediterranean to Italy or Malta or any European Union port where they can claim political asylum. Classically, the illegal immigrants will maintain that they are escaping persecution in their own countries. In an effort to justify their asylum claim, they will insist that they will suffer persecution, if not death, if they are forced to returned home. EU immigration authorities, under pressure from electorates which are increasingly opposed to the appearance of new immigrants whatever their reasons for coming, are increasingly leery of the grounds that they are given. Yet the illegal immigration industry - for that is what it is - is becoming increasingly sophisticated in the cover stories that it provides its customers. Yet what has not changed is the core journey that illegal immigrants have to take before they can start presenting their stories, genuine or false, to some EU immigration official. And herein lies a horror. The world was transfixed by the tragic loss of 300 lives when last month a migrant boat capsized off the Italian island of Lampedusa. It has since emerged that the foundering of the vessel was only the last of a series of horrors that the illegal migrants on board had had to face. The truth became known when asylum seekers held in a Lampedusa camp tried to lynch a newly arrived detainee. It turned out that this man, who was saved by camp officials, was accused by the other inmates of being the leader of the gang of people smugglers that had loaded them on to the unseaworthy craft that eventually capsized within sight of freedom with such a high loss of life. But that was not his crime in the eyes of his attackers. Their fury had been stirred because on their way to the Libyan coast, they had been held at a compound near Sebha in southern Libya. They had already each paid the people smugglers thousands of dollars for the whole trip to Europe, but suddenly they were told by a gang led by this individual that they needed to find up to $3,500 more to continue their journey. They were given phones to contact family and friends back home to wire the money to the people smugglers' account. Not all could manage this. So the traffickers tortured the men and took the women and raped them until money was finally handed over. The depravity of this act, the exploitation of entirely helpless individuals, beggars the belief of all decent people. It is hard to think of a punishment appropriate for criminals who could take such wicked advantage of their victims. Lynching is almost too good for them.
