A Senegalese migrant living in Italy who claimed to have been the victim of a racist attack has now confessed he lied about the entire affair, saying he stabbed himself.
The incident took place last summer when the 27-year-old Senegalese man arrived in hospital in critical condition with a deep cut to his throat, claiming that two men on the streets of the city of Sulmona had made racist insults before attacking him with a knife, Il Giornale reports.
The migrant told the emergency workers that he had been approached by the two men after leaving the migrant reception centre he had been living in and after attempting to slit his throat said “we’ll teach you how to live.”
He went on to claim that two men put him in their car and drove to an area where they threw him into a ditch where he remained overnight. and returned to the reception centre the next day.
After several months, the migrant’s story fell apart as he provided more and more inaccurate information to investigators. He eventually confessed to them there had been no racist attack and he had inflicted the injury on himself.
Investigators say the Senegalese man could be charged for making up the crime but the 27-year-old is currently in a fragile mental state.
The hate hoax comes just months after a Nigerian migrant claimed to have been attacked by “fascists” in Florence in a case where the attackers were later revealed to be Eastern European migrants originally from Romania.
Italy is not the only country in Europe to have recently seen hate crime hoaxes either. In November, Abdirahim “Husu” Hussein, a Social Democratic Party politician and Helsinki city councillor admitted to making up a hate hoax about a racist passenger in his taxi.
The admission came after the taxi company had found GPS evidence that refuted the claimed of the Somali migrant.