Police arrested two Pakistani asylum seekers in the northern Italian city of Aosta for allegedly raping a 13-year-old boy in a public garden.
Ali Raza, 25, and 23-year-old Usama Mazhar were said to have spent Friday afternoon with the boy, with the three of them having been seen drinking alcohol.
That evening, the two Pakistanis, who were granted subsidiary protection in Italy, took the young teen to the gardens near the Aosta train station and raped him, newspaper La Repubblica reports.
According to investigators, a witness passing by saw the abuse and called the police, who later arrived on the scene and found the teen in a state of shock.
The victim was taken to a hospital and was only released on Sunday, while the two Pakistanis were tracked down by police and arrested.
The case echoes another incident of child abuse that took part in the city of Brindisi in 2018, when two Pakistani nationals were accused of raping a boy who was waiting for a train at the city’s railway station.
As in Aosta, both of the Pakistani men were in their twenties and the victim had to be taken to a hospital due to the severity of the sexual abuse he had suffered.
Earlier this year, another case came to light involving two Pakistani migrants in Rome, who allegedly forcibly confined a 19-year-old German woman and are said to have sexually abused her over a period of several months before she was able to escape and alert authorities.
Reports stated that the woman had moved to Italy with her 29-year-old Pakistani boyfriend some two years prior to the incident and had shared it with her boyfriend’s 36-year-old Pakistani friend. After the woman escaped, police arrested the pair.