Former right-wing candidate shoots 6 African migrants in Italy

Former right-wing candidate shoots 6 African migrants in Italy

by ASSOCIATED PRESS

MILAN — A right-wing Italian gunman shot and wounded six African immigrants in a two-hour drive-by shooting spree Saturday, terrorizing a small Italian city where a Nigerian man was arrested days earlier in the gruesome killing of a teenager, police said.

The shooting suspect was identified as Luca Traini, a 28-year-old Italian with no previous record. Traini had run for town council on the anti-migrant Northern League's list in a local election last year in the town of Corridonia, but the party lost.

The news agency ANSA quoted friends of his as saying Traini had previously been affiliated with Italian extremist parties like the neo-fascist Forza Nuova and CasaPound.

As the violent attack unfolded in the central city of Macerata, police told residents to stay inside and ordered a halt to public transport to limit the casualties.

A video posted by the il Resto di Carlino newspaper later showed the suspect with an Italian flag draped over his shoulders being arrested by armed Carabinieri officers in the city center, near where he apparently fled his car on foot. Italian news reports said a gun was found inside the car and the suspect did a Fascist salute as he was arrested, but no salute was visible in the video.

The shooting spree came days after the slaying of 18-year-old Pamela Mastropietro and amid a heated electoral campaign in Italy where anti-foreigner sentiment has become a key theme as Italy struggles with large numbers of migrants coming across the Mediterranean Sea.

Macerata Mayor Romano Carancini confirmed that six foreigners, all black, were wounded in the shooting spree, and one was left with life-threatening injuries.

"They were all of color, this is obviously a grave fact. As was grave what happened to Pamela. The closeness of the two events makes you imagine there could be a connection," Carancini said.

Mastropietro's dismembered remains were found Wednesday in two suitcases two days after she walked away from a drug rehab community. A judge on Saturday confirmed the arrest of the main suspect, identified as 29-year-old Innocent Oseghale.

ANSA reported that the black car used in Saturday's shooting spree had been seen in the area where the woman's body was found and also near where the suspect lived.

Italian Premier Paolo Gentiloni said Italy would be "particularly severe against whoever thinks of nourishing this spiral of violence."
"We will stop this risk. We will stop it right away. We will stop it together," Gentiloni declared.

Former right-wing candidate shoots 6 African migrants in Italy - NBC ...

Wave of support from ‘ordinary people’ for far-right Italian who shot six African migrants: lawyer

MACERATA, ITALY – An Italian man accused of shooting six African migrants in a racist attack has received a wave of support from “ordinary people,” his lawyer said Wednesday.

Far-right sympathizer Luca Traini, who shot five men and one woman from Ghana, Mali and Nigeria in the central city of Macerata last Saturday, said the “trigger” was the murder of an Italian woman allegedly by a Nigerian asylum seeker.

And Traini’s views have earned him numerous messages of support, his lawyer, Giancarlo Giulianelli, said.

“These messages of solidarity continue to arrive, from all parts of the political spectrum — often from ordinary people and also from left-wing friends from Macerata and also obviously from right-wing people with the same ideology as Luca,” Giulianelli said.

“The messages mostly come from regular people who want to write letters or send money. Some even support the act itself, as though they were happy that he did it.

“There are people who say let me know your IBAN (bank details) so I can send money,’ but my client, although he thanks everyone for the messages, doesn’t intend to have any financial support because he wants it … to be sent to help Italian families in difficulty.”

Traini, a 28-year-old security agent, calmly awaited police draped in an Italian flag after the shootings in a country where immigration is a hot-button issue a month ahead of elections.

Giulianelli said his client snapped a day after a Nigerian asylum-seeker and drug dealer was arrested in the same town for the murder of an 18-year-old woman, whose dismembered body was discovered in suitcases.

“He went to the gym but then immediately changed his mind because he had this profound hatred inside of him. He lost it, that’s what he said. ‘I lost it and I wanted to kill black drug dealers.’ That was his version,” Guilianelli added.

“Leave aside the politics — Luca was a marginalized person with problems related to his life that exploded with this act.

“The act obviously had a racial element so it highlights Luca’s political ideology. But it was the act of a person who really isn’t very well.

“Luca is not a fascist criminal, he is a boy who needs help,” his lawyer insisted, saying people on the left and right swung from exaggerating to denying the problems posed by migration, whose solution “cannot be that given by Luca.”

Wave of support from 'ordinary people' for far-right Italian who shot ...