Locals were terrified as African migrants rioted, throwing projectiles and screaming threats at passers-by in a protest against “racist” Italians on Wednesday and Thursday in Turin.
The Bataclan massacre was a “revenge of the excluded”, warned one of the hundreds of migrants, most of them illegal, who took to the streets to protest against not being given a “decent life” by Italian taxpayers.
“We have nothing in this city”, a man from Cameroon said, angry that people in Italy “do not understand that we are also boys and would like a decent life”.
The rioters are among 1,500 Africans illegally squatting in Turin’s abandoned Olympic village. Most of the men are in their twenties and while there are some who work on the black market, many complain about having nothing to do.
“You Italians — tell your children that we are not dogs. Keep them quiet because our patience will end sooner or later,” one warned. Another cheered the Bataclan massacre in which 89 people were murdered, many of whom were reportedly tortured, hailing it as a “revenge of the excluded”. “One dead of ours [Africans], one death of yours,” he cried.
The trouble started on Wednesday evening when around 300 residents of the former Olympics site took to the streets. They blocked traffic, uprooted signposts, overturned garbage bins, and hurled stones and bottles while screaming “racist” and “bastards” at passers-by. “The Italians are racist and the police control us,” the migrants railed.
The riot calmed down after midnight when police arrived, but shops were forced to close the following day as violence erupted once again when migrants continued to riot.
The man who first notified police of the trouble recalled: “We were already in bed when there was this outbreak. They shook our shutters and the windows then a group of people ran out screaming. We were afraid, not for we adults, but for our children.”
A local called Umberto said he’s now considering moving away from the area after the scenes this week. “Until yesterday we were just fed up with this situation of lawlessness that is in the area. Now we’re really fearful,” he told La Stampa.
Northern League MEP Mario Borghezio said his anti-mass migration party has for years sounded the alarm on the situation at Turin’s former Olympics site, and warned that the danger it poses has become too acute to ignore.
He said: “It’s evident that measures taken so far have been insufficient to prevent the continuing acts of violence which are generating great fear and concern in citizens.”
“The government must now root out the gangrenous [criminality] of the site by taking the urgent and necessary step of relocating the migrants and expelling all criminals,” Borghezio added.
The Northern League politician called for zero tolerance of migrants at the former Olympic village last year when it emerged that three African men from the site had kidnapped, held for 30 hours, and repeatedly raped a girl with mental disabilities.
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