Italy and Tunisia’s political rapprochement is no longer a mystery, even for the least politicized among us. Some might even have nursed hopes of positive implications for Tunisian migrants in Italy. But any such hopes have since faded in the face of the growing number of Tunisians who have disappeared or died in suspicious circumstances inside Italian detention and expulsion centers. Optimism has quickly given way to indignation and anger as Tunisia nurtures a relationship in which the whims of fascist leader Giorgia Meloni seem to take precedence over the tears shed by dozens of Tunisian families.
Greek mythology tells the story of a young man named Icarus, held captive with his father inside a labyrinth. The father builds wings out of wax and feathers, and both take flight to make their escape. Ignoring his father’s warnings, however, Icarus draws too near to the sun. The wax melts, and the young man plummets into the sea. About a half a century ago, Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted his famous piece “The Fall of Icarus.” The piece portrays a peasant working in his field and ships sailing by, indifferent to Icarus’ plight. The British Library analyzes the painting as follows:
…only the legs of Icarus himself can be seen desperately flailing in the air. In the bottom right-hand corner… Icarus … has just fallen into the water. Around him, the rest of the world remains unperturbed, as if unaffected by his demise.
‘LANDSCAPE WITH THE FALL OF ICARUS’
… and the surrounding controversy
It is no exaggeration to describe the scene of Icarus’ fall as prophetic. How could a painting dating from nearly half a century ago so perfectly capture a scene witnessed by hundreds of undocumented Tunisian migrants each time an improvised sea vessel dumps its human cargo off the Italian coast? Bodies float at the water’s surface without drawing the slightest attention, as Frontex ships pursue their routes without stopping.
The Italian government has proven its indifference with regard to the disappearance or death of undocumented Tunisian migrants. It is the same attitude that Tunisia has adopted towards a number of issues. For instance: the suspicious circumstances surrounding the deaths of Tunisian migrants inside Italian prisons and detention centers, or the hundreds of missing Tunisians whose families still cling to the dream of being able to bury whatever might remain of their children.
Dozens of Tunisians meet their fate inside Italian prisons
For over two weeks, the body of Mohamed Amine Riahi, an undocumented Tunisian migrant, has been kept at the morgue of an Italian hospital. The circumstances surrounding the young man’s death inside a prison in the region of Treviso (northeastern Italy) are suspicious.
Riahi, nicknamed Danilo, was 21 years old. He had presented himself to Italian authorities as being under the age of 17, and was thus placed in a shelter for minors in Vicenza. But he ran away to live with a friend.
His sister, Norhane, tells Nawaat what happened to her brother:
My brother didn’t want to live in a shelter, so he ran away and went to stay with a friend. On Sunday, August 10, while he was walking with his friend, a police officer stopped him, asking, “Are you Danilo?” Then three other police officers arrived. He was beaten and sprayed with tear gas before being arrested. His friend called us to let us know the circumstances of his arrest. Then the wife of this friend contacted us to tell as that my brother had attempted suicide and that he had been transferred to the hospital, and subsequently returned to prison. We were tormented by uncertainty until the moment when Italian authorities contacted us to inform us that my brother had fallen into a coma.
On Wednesday, August 13, an Italian newspaper announced Riahi’s death, reporting that he had committed suicide “using jean pants.” But the family has contested this version for two reasons: the first is that their son was wearing underpants at the time of his arrest by Italian police; the second is that a close relative of the victim went to the hospital and filmed a video which showed a gaping wound stretching from Riahi’s head to his ear, without any trace of strangulation around his neck.
Riahi’s family awaits the repatriation of his body for burial in Tunisia as soon as a forensic report has been issued. His sister tells Nawaat:
We don’t trust whatever the Italian forensic department will say. We know that the death of my brother is suspicious, especially since we have proof which contradicts the official version. We also know that if we request a new autopsy, the repatriation of his body to Tunisia will take even more time. So we have decided to proceed with the repatriation as soon as the forensic report is published, in order to put out the fire that is burning in my mother’s heart.
Mohamed Amine Riahi is not the only Tunisian migrant who has died inside an Italian prison. Since the beginning of 2025, the deaths of nine Tunisian migrants have been reported, most of them in circumstances that remain unclear. That number is high, nearing the total number of recorded deaths—ten—reported in 2024.
Despite the magnitude of the tragedy, Tunisian authorities and their diplomatic representatives in Italy have expressed no official reaction, preferring to keep their silence.
On March 31, 2024, a 29-year-old Tunisian migrant died in the Forli prison. The public prosecutor opened an investigation into involuntary homicide against X. It was the fourth death of a Tunisian migrant recorded in Italian prisons within a three-month span. This took place about two weeks before the so-called historic meeting between Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and President Kais Saied. During the meeting, the leaders signed a Memorandum of Understanding whose content remains undisclosed. On the same occasion, Saied expressed “Tunisia’s pride for its solid historic relations with Italy,” and emphasized his commitment to “continuing to strengthen the tradition of consultation, coordination and consolidation of ties of cooperation and partnership, and to diversify them, between two friend countries, both at the bilateral and multilateral levels, in the common interest of the Tunisian and Italian peoples.” He did not evoke or even allude to two major questions for the families of Tunisian migrants in Italy: the large number of suspicious deaths in Italian prisons, and the migrants who have disappeared off the Italian coast.
Bodies in anonymous graves
Since the fall of Ben Ali in 2011, Tunisian families have been trying to learn the fate of sons and daughters who disappeared as they made their way, illegally, to Italy. The exact number of people who have disappeared at sea over the past fourteen years remains unknown. But under pressure from the victims’ families, an investigation commission was set up in June 2015 under the Ministry of Social Affairs. It prepared a list of 501 individuals who disappeared between 2011 and 2014. However, according to Imed Soltani, spokesperson of the association La Terre pour tous [Earth for all], this list may only represent half the number of those who went missing over the fourteen-year period. As Soltani told Nawaat,
The Ministry’s investigation commission established this list on the basis of case files submitted by certain families of those who went missing, but not all of them. Some organizations estimate that approximately 1,500 people disappeared between 2011 and 2014. We don’t have a precise count of the number of missing persons over the course of the past fifteen years, but it has certainly increased significantly.
Concerning the Office of the President and President Kais Saied’s attitude with regards to the issue, Soltani adds,
During his electoral campaign and before his arrival to power, Kais Saied met with the families of those who disappeared and literally told them “Do not give up on your children’s cases!” Since this admonition, however, he has completely ignored the issue. He has never talked about it, neither in his speeches nor during his meetings with Italy’s prime minister. In all these years, Tunisia has become complicit in this crime by closing its eyes to the fate of thousands of disappeared Tunisians, despite the fact that it is responsible for addressing the issue.
On June 4, 2015, the Minister of Social Affairs published a decree in the Official Gazette creating a commission “tasked with overseeing the case of those who disappeared following irregular migration towards the Italian coast during the years 2011 and 2012.” The commission was tasked with collecting data concerning the disappeared persons, to coordinate with Italy’s administrative authorities and Italian civil society actors in order to investigate the circumstances of their disappearances. This commission was composed of representatives of the Ministries of Social Affairs, Justice, National Defense, Interior and Foreign Affairs.
As of 2017, the commission ceased to exist. It never produced a single public report on the result of its work, and its president was transferred to the Office of Tunisians Abroad. The families of victims thus lost all hope in effective government intervention to coordinate with Italian authorities.
Interviewed by Nawaat, Romdhane Ben Amor of the migration department at the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES), explains:
The Tunisian Forum had signed on to work with the commission, but we subsequently backed out because we saw that there was a lack of political will on both sides, Italian and Tunisian, due to their constant attachment to procedural obstacles. With the end of this commission’s work, there was no longer anywhere for families to make their voices heard between the Ministries of the Interior, Health and Foreign Affairs. Today, cooperation is very limited, even inexistent, because political authorities continue to criminalize irregular migration. In the absence of an official interlocutor, some families have had to use their own resources in order to search for their children.
On November 30, 2019, a boat carrying six undocumented migrants left the shores of Bizerte and headed for the Italian coast, before disappearing with its passengers. Two months later, Jalila, who had two sons aboard the vessel, came across photographs of bodies that had been published by an Italian newspaper; she was able to identify her sons by their tattoos. Jalila received no support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but did not give up. She managed to contact Italian authorities and provided them with a DNA sample, which matched that of the two bodies.
Jalila found herself caught in a web of costly procedures in Italy, which she financed alone, without any aid or intervention by Tunisian authorities, in order to recover the bodies of her sons. She finally succeeded in bringing them back to Tunisia on April 28, 2021 so that they could be buried in a cemetery in Bizerte.
Contacted by Nawaat, former parliamentary deputy Majdi Karbai sheds light on Jalila’s predicament:
Tunisian authorities are only responsible for the repatriation of remains to Tunisia. In the case of undocumented migrants, however, the equation is different: Tunisian authorities in Italy do not identify Tunisian migrants who have been buried there, since it is costly for them. Instead, for every body recovered along the Italian coast, local authorities take a DNA sample from the victim before burying him or her unidentified.
Karbai adds that Tunisian authorities could effectively request DNA samples in order to compare them to those provided by families, especially since it is the latter who often notify authorities of these disappearances. But authorities do not take this step, making the identification of victims extremely difficult for families, with the exception of the few who take the initiative of directly contacting Italian authorities and humanitarian organizations in Italy. This is precisely what Jalila did after being ignored by Tunisian authorities. The repatriation of the bodies of her two sons cost her dearly.
According to Karbai, there are two reasons which account for families’ inability to identify or repatriate the bodies of their children: the absence of political courage, and the high cost of travel. As he explains to Nawaat,
Italy has a bank of DNA samples from undocumented migrants whose bodies were immediately buried following their recovery, without any notification by the local Tunisian consulate. Unfortunately, there is no political will to repatriate the bodies of undocumented Tunisian migrants who drowned off the Italian coast. Otherwise, this issue would have been one of the key points in negotiations between Tunisia and the European Union during the signature of the Memorandum of Understanding. And yet there are plausible solutions, such as negotiating access to Frontex’s visual archives, which would enable clear identification of the faces of migrants headed towards Italy. But Tunisia never raised this point during the negotiations which lead up to the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding, for the simple reason that the issue is not a priority for the government.
In 2014, Italy started systematically taking DNA samples of the bodies that wash up on its shores. But in the absence of an official Tunisian intermediary between families and local Italian authorities, the identification of Tunisian migrants has become extremely difficult. Imed Soltani indicates that “The association La Terre pour Tous created a committee of lawyers and civil society activists in Italy. This committee submitted files containing specific information about a number of migrants who disappeared to the Italian Ministry. However, the Ministry informed us that Tunisia wasn’t responding to its letters.” Soltani says that since 2012, the bodies of four undocumented Tunisian migrants remain buried in an Italian cemetery. But Tunisia refuses to request that the bodies be exhumed for DNA sampling so that they may be repatriated. Nor have authorities taken any steps in the case of Oussama Ragoubi, a Tunisian migrant who was arrested in a Lampadusa detention center in 2019 before his family lost contact with him. He remains missing to this day.
A press statement by the European Commission from April 27, 2023 reported that Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson’s visit to Tunisia (where she met with then Interior Minister Kamel Feki, former Social Affairs Minister Malek Ezzahi and former Foreign Affairs Minister Nabil Ammar) aimed to enhance operational cooperation with relevant EU agencies such as Eurojust and Europol. The statement noted that “the relevant Tunisian authorities and Europol will work towards finalising negotiations with a view to signing a working arrangement…”
Later, on December 15, 2023, the Council of the European Union published a document explaining that it was working to intensify and formalize cooperation between the affiliated EU agencies (Frontex, Europol, Cepol, EUAA and Eurojust) and Tunisia. The Commission mentioned, however, that it had not yet obtained Tunisia’s official agreement concerning the exchange of personal data in operations to counter smuggling and irregular migration.
In their dozens of meetings held with European counterparts, Tunisian officials never raised the question of Tunisian migrants who have disappeared off the Italian coast—either before signing the Memorandum of Understanding or during the meetings to discuss an agreement regarding the exchange of personal data in the case of undocumented migrants. There can be but one explanation for this omission: the current government, like those which preceded it, does not consider the cases of those who have disappeared nor the tragedies experienced by undocumented Tunisian migrants in Europe to be a priority. On the other hand, it accepts the meager crumbs of European aid—which serve to benefit European countries—at the expense of migrants’ dignity. Which is why the slogan denouncing Tunisian surveillance of Italian and European shores has become all the more fervent during protests against the unpopular populist policies of the July 25 regime.
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