A 26-year-old Algerian man accused of molesting a 14-year-old girl in Porto Torres was beaten by a group of people on Tuesday evening in what authorities describe as a “punitive mission.”
L’Unione Sarda reported how police intervened in the city center to prevent the crowd from inflicting more serious injuries or killing the man.
According to investigators, the alleged assault occurred on Sunday around 1 p.m. CCTV footage showed the man approaching the girl, initially in a jovial way, before making more insistent advances. The girl and her parents told officers that the encounter escalated into harassment and that she was grabbed by the hair before managing to break free and run home.
The family filed a complaint with the authorities, prompting an immediate search.
The suspect was identified through images captured by local surveillance cameras.
Authorities say the same man had been stopped days earlier in the port area of the city while attempting to board a vessel using fake identity documents.
He was reported to the Sassari Prosecutor’s Office for an immigration offense, and a judge ordered him to sign in regularly and barred him from leaving the municipality without authorization.
As Remix News reported last month, foreign nationals in Italy are disproportionately represented in violent and sexual offenses. Data from Italy’s Interior Ministry for 2024 shows that foreigners commit nearly half of all rapes across the country, while only representing 9 percent of the country’s resident population. Specifically, they are arrested in 43 percent of cases.
For public street robberies, foreigners make up 60.1 percent of suspects, and for robberies in total, it is 52.3 percent. Foreigners are responsible for 61 percent of burglaries and 69 percent of pickpocketing cases, according to data analyzed by Italian newspaper Il Sole 24.
When it comes to targeting minors, several high-profile incidents have taken place in recent weeks where attempts were made to kidnap toddlers. In Padua last month, a 22-year-old Tunisian national living in Italy was arrested after punching the father of a 1-year-old girl and attempting to walk away with the stroller containing the baby.
Similarly, in October, a Gambian minor was arrested in Bologna after allegedly attempting to kidnap a newborn baby from a stroller on Via Carracci, near the city’s high-speed train station. The 17-year-old suspect, who was living in a community center for unaccompanied minors, suddenly reached into the stroller and tried to take the baby, failing to do so only due to the intervention of the child’s parents and several witnesses.
