Italian authorities have revoked the residence permit of a 40-year-old Pakistani man in custody for the alleged rape of a 14-year-old girl at a bus stop.
Bolzano’s Police Commissioner Paolo Sartori issued a decree stripping the suspect of his residency rights and ordering his expulsion from Italy following his arrest for the sexual assault that occurred in the Casanova district.
The man, currently being held in pre-trial detention, had previously been involved in a criminal complaint for a similar offense.
The suspect, who worked professionally in the restaurant sector, arrived in Italy several years ago. Initially residing in Varese and later Verona, where he remains officially registered, he had recently come to Bolzano for temporary work and was staying with a friend.
According to the police, the assault occurred at around 7:30 p.m. on Friday near a bus shelter in Casanova after the young girl separated from a group of friends.
Il Riformista reported how the suspect approached his victim and asked for directions before apprehending her and dragging her into some bushes by the bus stop where the sexual assault took place.
After approximately 15 minutes, the schoolgirl managed to escape and asked a woman on the street for help. The bystander called the authorities and both the police and ambulance arrived at the scene.
Commissioner Sartori stated that the Prosecutor’s Office has yet to re-interview the minor, and her identity and other details remain undisclosed for privacy.
The attack comes amid a spate of sexual assaults by foreigners across Italy, leading Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini to speak out recently about other cases.
After a 27-year-old woman was gang raped earlier this month in a park in Turin by several North African migrants, Salvini wrote on social media, “Let’s see if there will be a judge in this case too who will force us to keep this precious foreign ‘resource’ in Italy too,” alluding to the recent decision by a Rome court to block the deportation of illegal migrants to asylum processing centers in Albania.
Interior ministry figures cited recently by Italian journalist Francesca Totolo showed that 11,141 Italian women were raped by foreign nationals in Italy between 2018 and 2023, equating to nearly five cases a day.
In June, a 27-year-old Iraqi migrant attempting to enter Italy illegally on a distressed boat was arrested for raping a 16-year-old fellow passenger before choking her to death, while earlier this month Remix News reported how a 10-year-old child had undergone an abortion following a rape by a Bangladeshi migrant at an asylum center in a small village outside Brescia.
Locals had taken to the streets back in 2015 about a local hotel being used as migrant accommodation but the protests were ignored.
