Italian police have detained a Somali migrant on suspicion of injuring four women and a six-year-old boy at the Italian holiday resort of Rimini on Saturday night.
Investigators for the time being are ruling out terrorism as a motive under the assumption that the 26-year-old man committed the crime under the influence of drugs.
Italian interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese called the incident “extremely serious” and said she would travel to Rimini on Monday to meet with local security leaders, according to Hungarian news agency MTI.
The man, who presumably boarded a bus without a ticket, wounded two female inspectors with a knife while on the bus and then attacked three passersby — including a child — as he escaped, Italian media reported. The little boy was being operated on, and his condition is critical. Police arrested the man on a side street.
After the incident, Matteo Salvini, leader of the anti-immigration League party, criticized Lamorgese’s performance in a video posted to Facebook. Salvini, whose party is a member of the governing coalition, has been putting pressure on the interior minister for months over tightening immigration policy.
The 26-year-old Somali man had been in Italy for a few months and applied for refugee status. In Rimini, he lived in a migrant shelter run by a Catholic charity. He has lived in Europe since 2015 and has already applied for asylum in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands, but his application has been rejected everywhere.
Title image: Police take into custody the Somali migrant who stabbed five people in Rimini, Italy. (Twitter/Federicolacop)
