“Go back to your country”, and then the machete: Modena, three arrests for attempted murder with racial hatred

MODENA – I had a date with a couple of friends to record music in the garage. Instead, he was forced to fight for his own life amid beatings, machetes and failed investments in automobiles, the victim of an assassination attempt that investigators deem “aggravated by the circumstance of the purpose of racial discrimination and hatred.” Victim of the ambush, which took place on the afternoon of July 15 on the southern outskirts of Modena, a 22-year-old man from Burkina Faso, wounded in the arm and covered in offenses – “Go back to your country, black , here we rule “- by a 53-year-old man and his two sons, 30 and 24 years old. The three were arrested this morning at first light by police officers, thus ending a “complex and coordinated” investigative activity coordinated by prosecutor Giuseppe Amara.

What at first seemed like an unprecedented violence of violence erupted for useless reasons (one look too many) actually revealed a more twisted dynamic to decipher. In fact, the 22-year-old would have found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, targeted because he was recognized as a friend of some North Africans with whom the attackers had unfinished business. Between the two groups (father and sons on the one hand, Maghreb on the other) a growing tension had built up, resulting in episodes of mutual crime.

On July 11, in fact, a Moroccan citizen had denounced one of the two brothers for robbery, who four days later filed a complaint for a similar robbery with a tear. Not only that: once they left the San Damaso police station with the complaint in hand, the three would have organized what the investigators themselves define as “a punitive expedition” against the Moroccan brothers “taking them close to their home”. in via Tignale del Garda. Failing to find them, they attacked the young man from Burkina Faso, “who unwittingly became the victim of reprisals.” Fortunately, the 22-year-old man managed to stop the machete blows directed at his face with his hand, and although seriously injured, he also avoided the reversal that the three attempted during the escape. Operated in the Baggiovara hospital, he still would not have recovered the full functionality of his left arm.

In any case, the whole affair took place in what the commander of the Modena flying squad, Mario Paternoster, defines as “an unstable context”. The three detainees, of Sinti origin, have backgrounds “of various kinds: drugs, crimes against the person and against property.” Likewise, considering that the same victim of the attack on August 5 was found in possession of marijuana and therefore subjected to house arrest, initially the investigators had also hypothesized as a reason for possible disagreements related to the world of drugs, but the investigations they did not provide evidence in this regard.