An Italian man trapped for six months in his country’s embassy in the UAE has claimed he is the victim of a diplomatic spat between the two states and pleaded with Giorgia Meloni’s government to bring him home.
Andrea Costantino, 49, said he had been living a “Groundhog day-like” existence in a tiny room at the Italian embassy in Abu Dhabi since being released in late May from the emirate’s notorious maximum-security prison, Al Wathba, where he spent more than a year on charges of funding terrorism in war-torn Yemen after shipping a cargo of diesel to a client there.
