Italy drive-by attack targets immigrants in Macerata

[Abdullah719]

Italian police have arrested a gunman suspected of a carrying out a drive-by shooting spree that targeted African immigrants.

At least six people were wounded in the central town of Macerata.

The suspect, named locally as Luca Traini, 28, had an Italian flag wrapped around his neck when he was detained.

He had taken part in regional elections for the anti-immigration Northern League last year and reportedly made a fascist salute when he was captured.

Italy votes in national elections on 4 March, with immigration one of the key issues.


Link to teenager's killing?

Mr Traini, who is from the surrounding Le Marche region, did not resist when he was detained after fleeing from his car near the town's war memorial. He is now being questioned. Police found a gun in his car.

The shooting had begun two hours earlier at about 11:00 local time (10:00 GMT), La Repubblica website reports.

The mayor had warned people to stay indoors during the incident, which saw shootings across a number of locations.

The victims are being treated in hospital. At least one of them is said to be in a serious condition.

Video of the moment the suspect was apprehended was published by local website, Il Resto del Carlino, showing a white bald man draped in an Italian tricolour being escorted away by police.

Italian police also tweeted a photo of the moment of capture, saying one of the wounded had required surgery.

Shots had been fired in the Via Spalato and Via dei Velini parts of town, two key areas in an investigation into the murder of an 18-year-old girl whose body was found dismembered and hidden in two suitcases last Wednesday.

A 29-year-old Nigerian male migrant has been detained over the killing of Pamela Mastropietro.

Several racist comments calling for revenge attacks were posted on the Facebook page of the victim's mother in the run up to Saturday's shootings, Ansa reports.

Local reports are linking the two incidents.

Right-wing politicians have been using Pamela Mastropietro's killing to promote their anti-migrant message as part of their campaign for the general election.

Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni has temporarily suspended campaigning over the shootings.

Opinion polls suggest a centre-right bloc, including the Northern League, Forza Italia and the far-right Brothers of Italy, will win the most seats but not a working majority.

With about 28% support in the opinion polls, the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement is the most popular single party. This suggests there could be tough coalition negotiations, or even another election, after 4 March.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42930749

 

[Cpt. Rishwat]

I know it's going to be seen as a horrifying action, and no doubt there will be deserved condemnation of the shooter, but the deeper question has to be, why are these immigrants willing to face such dangers and hardships to reach Europe? We had the story of the 90 immigrants from Pakistan who drowned en-route while trying to reach Italy.

Are things really so bad where they live that they will risk the lives of their families to make such dangerous journeys? Or is it they have had their heads filled with some image of Europe being the land of milk and honey and it's a piece of cake to get here?

I don't have a lot of sympathy to be honest.

 

[Abdullah719]

In a Pretty Little Hilltop Town in Italy, a Gruesome Murder and a Right Wing Shooter Gunning Down Refugees

ROME—Luca Traini, 28, wrapped an Italian flag around his neck, grabbed his Glock and got into his black Alfa Romeo 147 with one apparent motive: to shoot African migrants.

He then drove street to street around the small town of Macerata, shooting five men and one woman, injuring two seriously, before police were able to stop the shooting spree in front of the town’s monument to fallen soldiers. There, he then got out of his car, gave the Fascist salute and admitted to the crime, say police.

Traini, a muscled-up sometime boxer who ran for a local political post under the banner of Italy’s far-right Northern League party in 2017, had told his friends at the gym a day earlier, “I have a pistol and I’m not afraid to use it,” according to local Italian media reports.

Racial tensions in the small hilltop town of Macerata in the Marche region reached a boiling point last week with the arrest of a Nigerian migrant for the murder of 18-year-old Pamela Mastropietro who had been dismembered and stuffed into two trolley suitcases and left in a vacant field on the town’s city limits.

Photographs of Mastropietro as a teenager showed a pretty girl with long auburn hair and big dark eyes. But she had been in rehab, and had walked away from her treatment center two days before she died. Her clothes and blood was found in a house occupied by the Nigerian migrant arrested in connection with the murder.

Several people interviewed by local press after the shootings said Traini was in love with the victim of the crime. Autopsy reports have not been released to determine the cause of her death before her dismemberment, and no one has confirmed that Mastropietro reciprocated Traini’s feelings.

Marco Valerio Verni, the dead woman’s uncle, told RAI that they did not support Traini’s act if it was to avenge the death of their loved one. “All we want is justice, but we cannot fight barbarism with more barbarism,” he said. “Such actions are not justifiable. This country is fed up -- but such actions can never be justified.”

Verni was referring to what can easily be described as extreme racial tensions in the country ahead of March 4 national elections. Fear and anger are being fueled by the country’s far-right parties who are all campaigning on anti-immigration platforms.

Matteo Salvini, leader of the Northern League, of which Traini was a card-carrying member, distanced his party from the shooter in the name of the party, but still blamed the current “open migration policy” for these racial tensions. The Northern League has coupled with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party to run as a coalition that is currently polling ahead of the center left Democratic Party and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement.

Salvini, whose rallies often bring out supporters toting Mussolini and Hitler posters, is campaigning on a promise to immediately expel 100,000 African immigrants from Italy in his first year in office. More than 600,000 mostly sub-Saharan African migrants have entered Italy illegally by sea in the last four years. Migration is the top issue in the campaign ahead of the March 4 vote with all parties campaigning to stem the flow of migrants into the country.

Unlike the Northern League, the alt-right Forza Nuova neo-fascist party embraced the shooter, reportedly offering to pay Traini’s legal bills. Roberto Fiori, the party leader wrote a lengthy Facebook post supporting the shooter’s actions. “The degeneration of the immigration phenomenon, now totally out of control, the Nigerian tribal criminality that explodes as we expected it would, have happened, our young people are now at the mercy of forces that I would not hesitate to define as satanic,” he wrote.

"The only answer to these serious facts must be politics: to guard our neighborhoods, even physically oppose drug dealers, to prevent our cities from becoming lethal traps for our youth and an ideal place for all sorts of criminals and murderers,” Fiori wrote.

“I would not want the liberal left-wing to be unleashed against a young man who was certainly wrong, but who saw his city transformed in a short time from paradise to hell,” he said with typical hyperbole.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/in-a-...nd-a-right-wing-shooter-gunning-down-refugees