Italian Campaigner for Migrants Marries Her Libyan Muslim Criminal Lover

Every so often we read about an addle-headed woman who starts exchanging letters with an incarcerated criminal, over time convinces herself that he is innocent, and decides to marry him even while he is still serving his sentence. She’ll wait for him, however long it may take before he is freed; they marry; time passes, and instead of her imagined Prince Charming, she discovers she has married a monster, and divorces him if, that is, she manages to survive.

A variant on the tragicomical theme has just been reported from Italy, where Alessandra Sciurba, an Italian woman who was the president of a pro-migrant NGO, fell in love with a Libyan prisoner convicted of manslaughter, Alaa Faraj, and now plans to marry him. More on this tale can be found here: “Italy: Former pro-migrant NGO president prepares to marry Libyan people smuggler convicted of killing 49 people,” Remix News, April 16, 2026:

A convicted smuggler and former university student, 31-year-old Alaa Faraj, is set to marry Alessandra Sciurba, the former president of a pro-migrant NGO that focused on rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, according to Italian media.

Faraj, a Libyan national, has served 10 years in Palermo’s Ucciardone prison following his conviction for multiple manslaughter and aiding and abetting illegal immigration. Authorities identified him as one of the smugglers responsible for a tragic August 2015 shipwreck that claimed 49 lives.

Faraj was one of those heartless smugglers who charged Africans what, especially for them, were huge sums, and took them from Libya to the Italian island of Lampedusa in boats that were scarcely seaworthy. If the boat sank, the smugglers, unlike their paying passengers, wore flotation devices that kept them afloat. In Faraj’s case, 49 people drowned because he stuffed many more of them into a small boat that could not bear their weight.

Despite his conviction, Faraj has “always maintained his innocence.” In a significant legal development last December, Italian President Sergio Mattarella granted Faraj a partial pardon, resulting in a “sentence reduction of 11 years and 4 months.” While he currently has nine years remaining on his term, further reductions could see his detention end even sooner.

So now, with a reduced sentence — what led President Mattarella, normally a sensible man (I’ve been following his pronouncements on Italian television), to cut the sentence by nearly 50%? — he still has to serve only nine more years. Will Alessandra Sciurba be waiting for him when the prison gates finally swing open, and he emerges, blinking in the sunshine?

The relationship began within the prison walls during an educational laboratory conducted by Sciurba, a human rights professor and prominent activist who used to lead the NGO Mediterranea Saving Humans. She subsequently became the “voice of his fight for the truth,” according to Italian news outlet Imola Oggi.

Unlike Faraj’s trial judge, the gullible Ms. Sciurba fell for his sob story about his innocence, though how a people-smuggler using an unseaworthy boat that led to the drowning deaths of 49 people should win anyone’s sympathy is a puzzlement. No doubt his liquid brown eyes and deeply sincere mien had something to do with it. As it says in a Salinger story, “that’s just sex talking, buddy.”

Their collaboration led to the publication of the book “Because I was a Boy” (Perché ero ragazzo), published by Sellerio in September of last year, which Sciurba compiled from the letters Faraj sent to her from prison.

Because he was a boy — only 21, it turns out, when his boat sank, killing 49 of the passengers — he didn’t realize, you see, that what he was doing was wrong. He thought — as he explained in his letters to Sciurba — that he was only helping people to realize their dream — that is, to go to Europe, where peace and plenty reign, and to take advantage of all that those generous welfare states provide. He was her incarcerated prince, and she his distant princess, working to get his sentence reduced. She did so, by persuading President Mattarella to cut Faraj’s sentence in half. And she’s going to keep trying to get it shortened still further. She even helped him write — or more likely, wrote for him — a book about his “innocence” and his “ordeal” that, out of a diseased sympathy by the judges, is now a finalist for a literary award.

The book has gained critical acclaim, and Faraj is currently listed among the five finalists for the “22nd edition of the Tiziano Terzani International Literary Prize.”

The wedding is scheduled for June and is expected to be a notable interfaith event. According to the Italian outlet, “The Imam and the Archbishop of Palermo will celebrate the wedding in the church of San Gaetano in Brancaccio Corrado Lorefice.”

So they’ll let him out of jail to get married. A mixed marriage, with not just an imam, but an archbishop celebrating. An ordinary priest wouldn’t do. Only the best for Alessandra Sciurba and Alaa Faraj.

Before his arrest, Faraj was a 20-year-old engineering student in Benghazi. He reportedly fled the Libyan civil war to “pursue his dream of playing football in Europe“ before being intercepted and charged as a smuggler upon his arrival in Italy.

Should we be swayed by the fact he had been an engineering student, with “dreams” of playing soccer in Europe? Does that absolve him of taking large sums of money from many dozens of poor Africans, then taking them across the Mediterranean in an overloaded and unseaworthy boat, which led to its sinking, and the deaths of 49?

How did Faraj twist the facts to make himself palatable to Ms. Sciurba? His tall tale may have gone something like this: “Yes, I was on the boat, but I was not the smuggler. I was just a passenger like everyone else. I was lucky; I was one of those who didn’t drown. There were two smugglers on the boat. One was called Muhammad. I don’t remember the name of the other one.” That’s the same story he may have told in court when he was on trial for people-smuggling and causing the deaths of 49 people. The judge remained unconvinced. But Alessandra Sciurba, with her long history of helping migrants, overwhelmingly Muslim, to enter Italy, needed no convincing. After this interfaith wedding takes place — with an archbishop and an imam officiating, in another display of the interfaith racket — it’s back to prison for Faraj. Sbiura may yet persuade President Mattarella to commute his sentence to time served. Once he’s out, I give that marriage two years, maybe three. And then Alessandra Sciurba could get the surprise of her life.