Italy: Brutal sex attack forces laws to kick out migrants

3rd November 2007, Daily Mail

Italy yesterday brought in a law making it easier to expel 'undesirables' from other EU countries.

The move came amid outrage over the sex attack murder of an admiral's wife by a Romanian migrant.

Previously, EU citizens could only be sent home if they could be shown to pose a threat to the state, usually interpreted as a terrorist ...

The change, and fears of a backlash over the murder, led to an immediate exodus of Romanians by bus.

The ruling was rushed through after RE teacher Giovanna Reggiani, 47, was beaten with a rock in a sex attack by a Romanian migrant and her body dumped in a ditch. She died two days after the attack in a suburb of northern Rome.

Nicolae Mailat, 24, from Transylvania, was arrested in his ramshackle hovel at a nearby gipsy camp a short while later.

He had two previous convictions for theft in his home country ...

Before the new laws, Italian expulsion orders were lengthy and complicated. Now any EU citizen who has a conviction, or was under investigation, or was otherwise deemed a threat to society, could be held.

Each case would then go before a magistrate who would make a decision on expulsion within 48 hours. There is no appeal ...

Romanians have been blamed for 76 murders in the last 18 months, half of all rapes and a surge in people trafficking and prostitution.

At the same time, crime in Romania has fallen by 26 per cent.

Yesterday, camps and ramshackle homes were dismantled by masked police using tractors.

Dozens of Romanians were rounded up.

Many others headed home on buses. One woman burst into tears at Rome's bus station and said: "I've just spent 60 euros on a one-way ticket. We can't stay here. Everyone hated us before, now we are hated even more."

Lawrence Auster writes ...
Liberals only give up liberal policies out of horror:

Violent crime including rape and murder had shot through the roof as a result of the gypsy immigration. Gypsies--just one immigrant group--had been charged with 76 murders in Italy over the last year and a half. And then when a gypsy murders a more prominent type of person, suddenly the country is "shocked," and instantly gets rid of the policy that had prevented the deportation of criminal immigrants. Under liberalism, ruinous liberal policies can never be eliminated on the basis of reason, since that would imply there was something wrong with liberalism. They can only be changed on the basis of a pure wave of emotion, the sudden, spontaneous forming of a consensus that things have gone too far and something must be done. Such waves of emotion that arise from time to time may fix the worst excesses of liberalism, without bringing liberalism itself under question.

Legislator wants mass expulsion:

Opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi urged Italy to close its borders to Romanian workers and a conservative ally called for the expulsion of tens of thousands of immigrants as the country grappled Sunday with public outrage over a wave of violent crimes blamed on foreigners ...

"In Rome alone, 20,000 expulsions should be carried out right away," right-wing leader Gianfranco Fini, a key Berlusconi ally and a potential contender in the next election for prime minister, said on a TV talk show.

Berlusconi told La Stampa newspaper that Italy should enact a moratorium against Romanian workers. "If I were in the government, I would have done it," the billionaire media mogul and former prime minister was quoted as saying.

Armed with a government decree approved in an emergency cabinet session Oct. 31, authorities across Italy have begun expelling or readying expulsion orders for EU citizens with criminal records or those deemed dangerous to public safety ...

Romanians have been detained as suspects in several recent crimes, including the rape of a woman on church steps in northern Italy, a Tiber River bank mugging that left a Rome cyclist in a coma for weeks before he died and the robbery of a Milan coffee bar in which the elderly owner was beaten and her daughter raped ...

After Romania joined the EU this year, Romanians poured into Italy in search of work as maids, nannies, waiters, janitors and bricklayers, and they now account for nearly one per cent of the population in Italy.

Italy death sparks expulsion order:

"Horror in Rome" read the front-page headline Thursday in Il Messaggero, a daily newspaper in the city. "End of tolerance," began an accompanying editorial calling for a tough response.

Early Friday, Italian state radio said the woman had been taken off life support Thursday night after tests showed that her brain activity had ceased. Defense Minister Arturo Parisi sent the woman's husband, a navy commander, a message of condolence, officials said ...

The 47-year-old victim was attacked as she walked along a road after dark Tuesday toward the barracks where she lives, police said. She was beaten, dragged through mud and left half naked in a ditch.

The woman "was unconscious, breathing with difficulty," said Roberto Fornaiolo, one of the policemen who found the woman.

"She was covered with mud because she was dragged across the ground. At first we couldn't make out the bruises because there was so much blood on her face," Fornaiolo said ...

Police said dozens of shacks would be knocked down as part of the crackdown.

Italian news reports said Mailat had been given a three-year prison sentence in Romania for theft but had disappeared before he could be jailed.

A series of violent crimes in the capital has been blamed on Romanians in recent months. Oscar-winning director Giuseppe Tornatore was hospitalized over the summer after he was punched in the jaw by one of two muggers in an upscale neighborhood ...

The attacks have shocked Rome, where street violence has long been unusual.

Opinion polls show Prodi's popularity is low and that citizens link violent crime to immigrants.

"Today's horror in Rome ... is the consequence of yesterday's excessive tolerance," said the editorial in Il Messaggero.

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