Engineer Giovanni Calì, kidnapped last June 1st in Haiti, was released. This was reported by the Farnesina. Our countryman had been picked up at the construction site where he worked by a local criminal group. The release, after only 22 days, was possible thanks to the daily work of our intelligence and the Crisis Unit of the Farnesina, which maintained contact with the family in Sicily day after day.
«The engineer Giovanni Calì, kidnapped last June 1st in Haiti, has just been released. Our countryman had been picked up by a local criminal group at the construction site where he worked. Thanks to our intelligence and the Crisis Unit of @ItalyMFA »: so on foreign minister, Luigi di Maio, in a tweet about the entrepreneur’s release.
Seventy-four years old, from Catania, Calì was in the Caribbean country on behalf of the construction company Bonifica Spa, based in Rome. Half a million dollars: That was the ransom demanded by the kidnappers. A request that, according to sources who closely followed the story, was much higher than the average of ransoms in a country among the poorest in the world where in recent years the scourge of kidnappings for extortion purposes has increased in a frightening way. There were 243 of them last year alone.