AND THEN MY PRIESTS WILL DO TO YOU WHAT MY WARRIORS OF HOPE DO TO WOMEN, MY SON
Rape allegations leveled against foreigners are fueling anti-immigrant sentiment in Italy ahead of elections due early next year, when migration is likely to top the political agenda.
Anti-immigration politicians have leapt on the crimes to ram home their message that the center-left government has been lax on border controls, allowing more than 600,000 migrants, mainly Africans, to enter the country over the past four years.
A Bangladeshi man was arrested in Rome recently on suspicion of raping a Finnish au pair. The Rome case came two weeks after a young Polish tourist said she was gang raped by four Africans, three of them aged under 18, on a beach in the Adriatic resort of Rimini.
The woman’s partner was badly beaten by the youths and a Peruvian transsexual said she was raped and assaulted by the same quartet later the same night.
The leader of the gang was named as a Congolese asylum-seeker who had been allowed to stay in Italy on humanitarian grounds. The other three were Moroccan brothers aged 15 and 17, who were born in Italy, and a 16-year-old Nigerian.
Opposition parties say the government cannot ignore the issue, pointing to official data showing that in the first seven months of the year 1,534 Italians were arrested or accused of rape compared with 904 foreigners suspected of the same crime.
Some 40 percent of rapes are being committed by foreigners who make up 8 percent of the population.
http://archive.is/EeHmK#selection-929.0-933.100
