On a bright autumn day in September 2014, the body of a woman was hauled from the Lunel canal, a stretch of water that crosses a flat, marshy area of Montpellier. French police at first assumed she had drowned. There were no signs of injury, but her nakedness was a cause for concern.



The body was that of Silvana Beqiraj, an Albanian. Silvana was originally from Ndërmenas, a village in the district of Fier, an industrial town 100km from the Albanian capital, Tirana. A divorced mother of two, she had migrated to France four years earlier, leaving her young children with her parents. Another Albanian woman, Bukurie Elmazi, also from Fier, had moved to France with Silvana in 2011, having persuaded her to migrate for “better opportunities”, according to Silvana’s family. Elmazi identified the body.

“She told us she had moved there to look after an elderly woman,” says Silvana’s father, Mehmet Beqiraj, when I visit the family at their tiny, run-down farm. “But we were all suspicious.”

Silvana’s parents, Yllka and Mehmet Beqiraj. Photograph: Julie Bindel

A murder investigation was opened in France soon after it was discovered that Silvana had been involved in prostitution in Montpellier, but the family still have no idea what happened to her. The exact cause of death has never been established by police or forensic pathologists, and to date no one has been arrested or charged.

Silvana’s family refuse to accept that their daughter was trafficked, preferring to believe that if she was in prostitution, it was voluntary.

“If you have a pimp or a trafficker you can’t bring much money in,” says her brother (who did not want to be identified), a man still racked with pain. “She sent us a lot of money. If she had a trafficker he wouldn’t let her send us money.”

The evidence, however, suggests otherwise.

Her brother says the men who “took Silvana to France” still live in the village, while Mehmet maintains Silvana only sent back small amounts of money, when she was able. Certainly, there was no sign of affluence in the family home.

Days after hearing of his daughter’s death, Mehmet travelled to Montpellier to meet with police.

“The Albanians [at the consulate] provided only one interpreter and nothing else. I was treated badly and they were arrogant and ignored me,” he says.

Silvana’s body was held by the coroner in France for seven months. When it was released, the family was informed it would cost a minimum of €6,000 (£5,336) to transport it back to Albania. “We have no money,” says Mehmet. “We had to find it somehow.”

Life in the village had not been easy for Silvana. As with many women from traditional Albanian communities, she entered an arranged marriage when she was 20.

After five years, Silvana filed for divorce and moved back to the family home with her children. Within a year, Silvana met Nuri Çela, a man from a neighbouring village. Not long after the couple moved in together, Çela was shot dead as they walked home. “It was over a debt,” says Sylvana’s mother, Yllka, sobbing. “They owed her €3,500 and all Çela did was ask for it back.”

Silvana’s mother, Yllka, at the grave of her daughter, close to the family farm in the Fier district of Albania. Photograph: Julie Bindel

According to a local journalist, Laureta Rroshi, Silvana had given the money to a trafficking gang to organise her transport and set her up in prostitution in France. Silvana subsequently changed her mind and asked for the money back.

It is impossible to tell exactly why Silvana agreed to go to France. But what is known about the trafficking of women from rural Albania is that they are promised a better life, then end up being debt-bonded as a result of the extortionate costs for the journey and subsequent accommodation imposed by traffickers. Their families back home receive threats if they do not comply.

“Even Silvana’s children were aware that their mother had been trafficked to France,” says Rroshi.

‘The gangs transporting women are brutal’

In the late 1990s, the Albanian government began to accept that trafficking in women was a serious problem. Experts were brought in to advise on how to identify victims and prosecute perpetrators.

Despite such efforts, and the millions of dollars poured into anti-trafficking law enforcement, it remains a serious problem in the Balkan region in general and Albania in particular.

National Crime Agency statistics show that, in the third quarter of 2017, the majority of girls and women trafficked into the UK were from Albania.

Scant attention is given to trafficking-related crimes in Albania, which means little deterrence.

The journey from the southern Albanian port city of Vlora to Brindisi, on the Italian coast, is approximately 90 minutes by speedboat, which is why Vlora became known as the trafficking hub of Albania. Today, Fier is more notorious, but Vlora still has its problems.



“I think that trafficking is decreasing,” says Balida, a warm, friendly police officer from the anti-trafficking unit in Vlora. “There are no gangs any more, just men offering marriage to the girls. They go willingly to Italy or wherever.”

According to Balida, convictions for traffickers are rare because victims “refuse to cooperate”. “When we call [a complainant] a prostitute, she says, ‘I do it as a profession. This is my profession.’ So if she does not think she is a victim, why should we?

“I think, more than the clients, we should criminalise the girls. Because the girls I’ve known do this kind of job for their desire. They are not under pressure, the girls I have met.”

Asked how many traffickers she or her team have arrested and interviewed under caution, Balida replies without hesitation. “None,” she says.

I was inspected like cattle to see how much they thought I was worth Sara, trafficked to Italy aged 13

“We have groups involved in trafficking but we don’t have proof to arrest them. We just keep them under surveillance but we don’t have proof that they do it.” Was she aware of the Beqiraj case? “Yes, but no one will come forward,” she says. “Maybe she just made enemies, and everyone is scared of them.”

In Albania, reprisals towards trafficking victims are as harsh as they are commonplace. Anti-trafficking organisations and police officers tell grim tales of the torture inflicted on girls and women who try to escape.

One 20-year old victim who ran away on discovering she was pregnant to one of the men who bought her was found and taken to a building site. In full view of the other women, who had been taken to the site to watch, she was severely beaten before being bricked into a concrete wall while still alive.

Other women stay with the traffickers because the criminals know where their families live, and have been told they will die if they dare to escape or go to the police for help.

Four years after Silvana’s body was discovered, police are no further forward with the case. Photograph: Julie Bindel

Some women in Vlora have been lucky enough to find support at the Vatra (women’s health) shelter for trafficking victims.

In a large, comfortable communal lounge at the centre, about 20 staff, volunteers and residents sit, while children play quietly nearby.

Sara, one of the residents, says she was trafficked by a local man when she was 13. “It was a man I believed to be my boyfriend, but he sold me to three men in Tirana, and they took me to Italy,” says Sara, who has a child living with her in the refuge. “On the way I was raped, beaten, humiliated, and even inspected like cattle to see how much they thought I was worth.”

Sara escaped when she was told to go to a new brothel in the small town near Turin.

“I went to police and thank God they believed me,” she says. “They sent me for help [to the International Organisation for Migration] and they helped me get home. But the police in Vlora did not believe me. They said I was lying because I had been a prostitute in Italy, and that it was my free choice. They said I would be arrested if I bothered them again.”

Four years after Silvana’s body was discovered, police are no further forward with the case. “It was a terrible reminder of how dangerous prostitution is for Albanian women,” says a Europol police officer currently on secondment in Albania from western Europe. “The gangs transporting females for this purpose are some of the most brutal we have encountered. Even the Russians are scared of them.”

Journalists in Tirana and Fier say no news has filtered through from France about the investigation in a long time. Police in Montpellier likewise claim no information is available.

Silvana’s grave is situated on a dry patch of land above her family’s farm. Other kin are buried there, says Yllka. She starts to cry, and asks for help in finding out what happened to her daughter. “[The police] don’t care,” she sobs, “and here they just think the girls are all prostitutes. But someone is to blame.”

The grave is merely a plaque embedded into the hard ground, adorned with a photograph of Silvana. “We can’t yet afford a gravestone for her,” says Mehmet, briefly touching the photograph. On the plaque is Silvana’s name, and dates of her birth and burial. No date of death, as if the family refuse to accept, until they have answers as to how their daughter died, that it ever happened at all.