Italian police has arrested two men in Foggia on hate crime charges. They allegedly threw stones at foreign farmworkers last summer., injuring several migrants.
A total of six migrant farmworkers became the targets of stones thrown from a moving car in June and July of 2018 near Foggia, in south-central Italy. Some of them were injured.
Now, after months of investigation, police have identified and arrested two Foggia residents in connection with the crime: Pasquale Verderosa, 22, and Antonio Salvatore Doniaquio, 21, the latter of whom already has a criminal record.
The preliminary investigative judge at the Foggia court, Michela Valente, ordered house arrest for the two men. The charges: Multiple aggravated personal injury, propaganda, and instigation to commit a crime for reasons of racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination.
'Suspects violent against the weak'
In the arrest order, the judge wrote that the suspects "showed themselves to be contemptuous of the life and safety of others, accustomed to mocking and exerting violence against weak people who, at the first light of dawn, go with bicycles to work in the fields. The planned, repeated, and free resort to violence demonstrates people who are heedless of the consequences of their actions, and of the concrete possibility of causing even the death of the victims."
Foggia lead prosecutor Ludovico Vaccaro said that "the judges are usually always very cautious, yet in this case the investigating judge stigmatises the seriousness of the gratuitous nature of the incident." He added: "These young men had no reason to strike, injure, and throw stones at migrants."
Three violent stone-throwing episodes
Police managed to identify the suspects through video surveillance images from cameras in the area. The victims were also able to give police information that assisted in their investigation. All of the victims said they had seen the stones being thrown from a dark-coloured car.
Police said the two suspects committed three different stone-throwing assaults.The first took place July 15 in via Manfredonia, in which two men from Senegal and a man from Ghana were injured. The other two episodes targeted a man from Gambia and two men from Senegal and took place on July 23.