A placid day out on Lake Maggiore in northern Italy to celebrate a birthday turned into tragedy on Sunday when an unexpected storm caused a tourist boat with about 20 people on board to capsize and sink 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 wreck took a turn: two of the dead, Claudio Alonzi and Tiziana Barboni, were agents of the Italian intelligence services; another, Shimoni Erez, was a retired Israeli secret service agent, while the fourth victim is a 53-year-old Russian citizen, Ania Bojkova, partner of the ship’s captain, who was renting it for tourism purposes.
As 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 with other Italian agents, with the plan to make an excursion around the islands of Lake Maggiore and a lunch in one of these restaurants.
The Corriere della Sera went further and indicated that the captain, Claudio Carminati, spoke Bulgarian and French and would be a contact within the circuit of intelligence agents. Always according to the newspaper, at first the day at 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 their return flight, so they decided to postpone it until Monday to spend the day at the lake. One of them knew Carminati, so he proposed the boat excursion plan.
When the identities of the dead were known, investigators began to suspect that there could be more agents of the secret services on the ship because there was no record of their passage through nearby towns. In fact, La Repubblica claims that, after explaining what happened to the carabinieri on Sunday night, they all quickly disappeared. The Israelis took a military flight to Tel-Aviv on Monday morning, and even one of the two Ford vans rented for the excursion was parked at the dock from where the boat had set sail. The Italian newspaper adds that the Italians left the emergency rooms of the hospitals where they were treated very quickly, and that in the hotels where they stayed between the towns of Sesto Calende and Malpensa there is no trace of the overnight stay.
Now the investigators are focused on knowing why there were more than 20 passengers in the boat, 15 meters long and with capacity for 15 people. Also why they didn’t return very quickly to the shore when the storm was approaching and stayed about 150 meters from the coast, which other boats did after receiving the warning from the port managers. According to witnesses, one of the dead Italian agents, Barboni, 53, had a panic attack in the storm and took refuge in the ship’s cabin, where Captain Carminati allegedly sent the woman, Bojkova, who he has also ended up losing his life, to keep him company. “We also sail if it rains”, promised Carminati in the ads on the specialized boat rental pages.
