In Naples, 32-year-old Senegalese street vendor Cisse Elhadji Diebel was about to collect his wares and go home, when he was shot three times by two strangers on a scooter by the central train station.
One of the bullets hit his femur, for which he has undergone surgery. Another missed him. The third is now lodged in the phone he was carrying in his pocket.
While gun and gang violence have long marred Naples, alarm bells are ringing over the rapid rise in racist assaults – at least 33 across the country in the past two months, according to Italian weekly L’Espresso.
In another attack, on June 11, two Malian refugees living in a migrant centre near Caserta, a city north of Naples, were also shot at from a vehicle.
The victims told local media that the shooters had shouted slogans in support of Matteo Salvini, Italy’s new interior minister and leader of the far-right League party, who won support in the March 4 election.
Police do not regularly publish hate crime statistics in Italy.
In 2016, OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), which monitors hate crime among participating countries, reported 803 as recorded by police, with the majority based on racism and xenophobia.
Source: Al-jazeera
