A peaceful day on Lake Maggiore, in northern Italy, to celebrate a birthday, ended up turning into a tragedy on Sunday when an unexpected storm caused a tourist boat with about twenty people on board to capsize and end up sinking to the bottom of the lake. lake.
Four of the people on board lost their lives, while the rest managed to swim to shore or be rescued by other boats. But when the rescue personnel began to collect the documents of the victims, the shipwreck took a turn: two of the deceased, Claudio Alonzi and Tiziana Barboni, were agents of the Italian intelligence services; another, Shimoni Erez, was a retired agent of the Israeli secret services, while the fourth victim is a 53-year-old Russian citizen, Anya Bozhkova, partner of the captain of the boat, which she rented for tourist purposes.
According to what the Italian newspapers reconstructed yesterday, a dozen of the passengers were Mossad agents who would have traveled to Italy to celebrate the birthday of a member of the group along with other Italian agents, with the plan of going on an excursion to the islands of Lake Maggiore and a meal in a restaurant in one of them.
The Corriere della Sera went further and pointed out that the captain, Claudio Carminati, spoke Bulgarian and French and would be a contact in the circuit of intelligence agents. Always according to this newspaper, at first the day on the lake was not planned, but was organized at the last minute after some meetings in Lombardy for an exchange of information and documents. The Israelis would have missed the return flight, so they decided to postpone it until Monday to spend this day at the lake. One of them knew Carminati, so he proposed the boat excursion plan.
Once the identity of the deceased was known, the investigators began to suspect that there could be more secret service agents on the ship because there was no record of their passage through nearby towns. In fact, La Repubblica assures that, after explaining what happened to the carabinieri on Sunday night, they all quickly disappeared. The Israelis took a military flight to Tel Aviv the same Monday morning, and even one of the two Ford vans rented for the excursion was parked at the pier from where the boat had left. The Italian newspaper adds that the Italians left the emergency rooms of the hospitals in which they were treated in a hurry, and that in the hotels where they stayed between the towns of Sesto Calende and Malpensa there is no trace of their overnight stay.
Now the researchers are focused on finding out why there were more than 20 passengers in the 15-meter boat with a capacity for 15 people. Also, why did they not hurry back to the shore when the storm was approaching and stay about 150 meters from the coast, something that other vessels did after receiving notice from the port managers. According to witnesses, one of the deceased Italian agents, Barboni, 53, had a panic attack due to the storm and took refuge inside the cabin of the ship, the place where Captain Carminati would have sent his wife, Bozhkova, who has also ended up losing her life, to keep her company. “We also sail if it rainsâ€, promised Carminati in his advertisements on the specialized boat rental pages.
