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ROME - Three Romanians were in hospitals in Rome - one of them seriously injured - after being attacked by a masked, club-wielding gang in the latest escalation of racial tension in Italy following the beating to death of a naval captain's wife.
The violence, condemned by local politicians, came as authorities in Milan carried out the first expulsions of Romanians under new legislation that came into effect on Saturday allowing for the removal of EU citizens judged to be a threat to public security. Italian television showed four men being hustled aboard an airliner by police after nightfall.
Emotions were again running high at a funeral service in Rome for Giovanna Reggiani, the 47-year-old woman who was discovered fatally injured in a ditch last week after being savagely attacked. A young Romanian has been arrested and jailed. He has admitted snatching her bag, but denies beating and sexually assaulting her.
A thousand people packed into the church, in a well-heeled district of the capital. Large numbers gathered outside.
Reggiani, though married to a Catholic, was a member of Italy's tiny Protestant community, the Waldensians.
Her husband, the commander of the Navy's minesweeping squadron, arrived at the church holding a single red rose. Those who sat nearby said that, throughout the service, he muttered over and again: "It's not fair."
Reggiani's death has profoundly shocked the Italian middle classes.
She was robbed, stripped of most of her clothes and ferociously beaten in a lonely part of northern Rome, but one that was until recently considered safe and respectable enough for officers' married quarters. In just a few years, it has become a haunt for prostitutes and pimps, dotted with encampments set up by the latest wave of immigrants from eastern European.
Most of the 560,000 Romanians who have poured into Italy since visa restrictions were lifted five years ago have come to work. But the Government says they account for a disproportionate share of crime, including more than 5 per cent of murders.
Many of the recent arrivals have come to Rome where they live in sub- standard conditions.
- Observer
