Giovanni Lo Porto died during a January 2015 raid on the al-Qaida compound where he and a fellow hostage were being held

The mother of Giovanni Lo Porto had every reason to feel optimistic when, on 23 April last year, the foreign ministry said they had news about her son.

The 37-year-old Italian aid worker, known as Giancarlo to those closest to him, had been kidnapped in Pakistan in 2012, but the family had recently received assurances that he was close to being released.

Instead, Giusy Felice and the rest of the Lo Porto family received the grim news that Giancarlo was dead, killed in an American drone strike in January that targeted the al-Qaida compound in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan where he was being held.

As Felice was being told the news in Sicily, US president Barack Obama was stepping up to a podium in the White House press room in Washington, making a rare public admission that the US had accidentally killed two civilian hostages – Lo Porto and an American named Warren Weinstein – in a secret counterterrorism mission. Despite “hundreds of hours of surveillance” of the area, the president said that US intelligence officials had been unaware that Lo Porto and Weinstein were in the compound. The attack had killed “dangerous members of al-Qaida” who could not otherwise have been captured, he said.



In the year since the strike occurred on 15 January 2015, Lo Porto’s younger brother, Daniele, said his family felt as if it had been abandoned by Italian and US officials, who never got in touch again after the initial round of public condolences.

In an interview in a coffee bar in the Tuscan city of Pistoia, Daniele, who works on the night shift at a local supermarket, and his wife, Katia, said the Lo Porto family had been left with countless questions about the circumstances of Giancarlo’s death.

“[The ministry] told me in December 2014 by phone that Giancarlo was coming home, that the negotiations were positive and had reached a good point,” Daniele said. “Who knows how they would have freed him? If they pay, they don’t say they pay.”

Today, Daniele said, it was the silence of all parties involved that pained his family the most.

“Why is no one talking about it any more? Italy is doing like it did in the Roman times: they have washed their hands of it.

“If no one talks to you, you develop your own ideas. Italy doesn’t say anything. America doesn’t say anything, so what do you do? You think for yourself. You think, and think,” he said.

Obama knew that my brother and the American were there, but he was interested in four Taliban who were big fish Daniele Lo Porto

His mother never left home any more, he said, because she profoundly misses the boy who used to be content living out of his backpack. Giancarlo had stood out among the five brothers since their childhood in Palermo. He never boasted about the degrees he had earned, or the ease with which he spoke multiple languages, or his travels around the world, from the Central African Republic to Haiti, Daniele recalled.

“My mother-in-law does nothing but cry ... a whole household is dead,” Katia said.

The Lo Portos noted how differently they had been treated compared with the family of Valeria Solesin, the 28-year-old Italian student who was killed in the Paris attacks last year. Solesin’s state funeral in Venice was nationally televised and attended by Sergio Mattarella, the Italian head of state. But no senior American or Italian government officials attended Lo Porto’s funeral. Even bringing his remains from Rome to Palermo had been a bureaucratic nightmare, the family said.

“It’s logical for them not to come to the funeral: it shows they have a dirty conscience and they didn’t have the courage,” Daniele said.



The little information they have received about Giancarlo’s captivity came from Bernd Mühlenbeck, a German aid worker who was kidnapped with Lo Porto in January 2012 and released in October 2014, just months before the drone strike.



The circumstances of Mühlenbeck’s release are not publicly known and the German aid worker has declined multiple requests for an interview.



But Daniele Lo Porto said a distraught Mühlenbeck came to visit Lo Porto’s mother in Palermo after Giancarlo was killed.



“He was sorry, sorry, sorry. He was crying, he told her that the Pakistanis treated him very well,” Katia recalled, according to what she had heard from Giancarlo’s mother. “[Mühlenbeck] told her he was always talking about his family, his mother.”



Daniele said that Mühlenbeck revealed he and Giancarlo had been writing a book together in captivity, but that it was destroyed when it was discovered by their captors. The German said the two had read 111 books while they were being held and had been given things they needed, like deodorant.

“He says in Germany they told him to be quiet. [They said he could] go see my mother because it was the right thing, to tell her how it was when they were together, but nothing about his liberation,” Daniele said.

One of the main issues that has divided US and European officials in such cases are differences in how they approach hostage situations, with the US adamantly refusing to make ransom payments. In the case of Weinstein, the family privately paid a $250,000 ransom, according to US reports, but it did not save him.

While Italy has repeatedly stated it does not pay ransoms for hostages, the Guardian reported last year that it did pay for the release of two civilian hostages – Vanessa Marzullo and Greta Ramelli – who were held in Syria last year.

The question that continues to weigh on Daniele is how the US could not have known that Lo Porto was in the compound.

“Obama knew that my brother and the American were there, but he was interested in four Taliban who were big fish,” Daniele said.

A report in the Washington Post last year said that the CIA was investigating a “surveillance lapse” as part of an internal investigation into the killing of Weinstein. Citing US officials, the report said that footage examined before the lethal drone strike showed a possible hostage in the area.

The US embassy in Rome declined to comment. The Italian foreign ministry declined to return a request for comment.

While the Lo Porto family has not received any compensation from the US government – nor any offer – Daniele said their lawyer was preparing a request for reimbursement “based on what Obama said”.



“I don’t want anything from the [US] government. I don’t care, zero. Just that they should say that things went like this, and like this, and like this. But if you stay quiet, what should I do? Stay quiet and not even get any money and everything is fine?” he said.