Fears for Polish workers in Italy

By Mark Duff
BBC News, Rome

The missing include women and children

The disappearance of more than 100 Polish migrants in Italy in recent years is being investigated by police in both countries.

The fear is that they may have fallen into the hands of organised criminal gangs in southern Italy.

Polish police have taken the unusual step of posting details of the missing on their website.

It follows an investigation by Italian police into the abuse of migrant workers in Puglia region.

That led Italy's chief anti-Mafia prosecutor to speak of immigrants being kept as slave labourers in concentration camps.

Police said the workers were starved, beaten and forced to work for up to 15 hours a day while they worked the tomato fields around the city of Foggia.

The investigation also reportedly uncovered evidence of murder.

Italy's La Repubblica newspaper says police overheard a farm guard tell his girlfriend he was so irritated that two workers had escaped, he was going to kill one or two others as an example to those who remained.

The paper added that police are also investigating several mysterious deaths of East Europeans in Puglia, on the southern heel of the Italian peninsula.

More than 100 Poles who have disappeared over the past six years after saying they were going to Italy for work now feature on the Polish police website.

Their faces stare out from the web page: men, women, young and old. Investigators fear that some of them could be dead.