The 19-year-old son of Italy’s Matteo Salvini, leader of the populist League (Lega) party, Deputy Prime Minister, and Infrastructure Minister, was threatened with a broken glass bottle and robbed of his phone on the streets of Milan.
Mr Salvini’s son Federico was robbed of his mobile phone on Christmas Eve while walking the street after leaving his father’s home and heading to a friend’s house for a birthday dinner.
Fabrizia Ieluzzi, Federico’s mother, explained the incident, saying: “There were two of them, they blocked him in the street with the excuse of asking him for a cigarette, then they broke a glass bottle and with the shard pointed at Federico, they showed him their true intentions,” newspaper Il Giornale reports.
“They took his phone, a model of iPhone that is not recent but that he had for six months, and some money, but returned the wallet with the documents, then ran away,” she added.
Ieluzzi was able to geolocate the phone with her iPad and police recovered it around 12 hours later after the thieves tried to sell it to an Egyptian in the San Siro area, who alerted authorities after becoming suspicious.
Salvini himself said of the incident: “It can happen, it happened to him as, unfortunately, it happens to many in Milan: fortunately no one was hurt.”
The incident is not the first time the child of a well-known populist politician has been attacked or robbed on the street. In 2018, the daughter of French presidential contender Marine Le Pen was attacked outside of a bowling alley bar in Nanterre and had to be hospitalised as a result of the violence.
The incident saw two men, aged 32 and 47, approach Le Pen’s then 19-year-old daughter and her cousin and attack them, although the motive for the assault was not clear at the time.
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