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ATTACK

Journalist attack places media spotlight on Italian seaside town

The Italian resort town of Ostia has been in the media spotlight since Tuesday, when the brother of a mafia boss violently assaulted a journalist.

Published: 11 November 2017 14:20 CET
Journalist attack places media spotlight on Italian seaside town
A view of Ostia Lido in Ostia on the outskirts of Rome. Photo: AFP

Roberto Spada was filmed headbutting TV reporter Daniele Piervincenzi, before attacking him with a baton.

Piervincenzi had been investigating Spada's alleged links to the far-right CasaPound movement and his nose was fractured in the attack.

In Ostia on Friday dozens of Italian journalists protested in defence of freedom of speech after the attack on their colleague.

The town, which is situated on the outskirts of Rome, has a population of 85,000, many of whom live on impoverished estates.

Piervincenzi was questioning Spada for a report for national broadcaster Rai about municipal elections, two years after the local council was dissolved due to mafia infiltration.

CasaPound, suspected of links to organised crime in the area, won eight percent of the first round votes.

Italian police arrested Spada on Thursday for assault, with prosecutors saying his behaviour was typical of methods used by organised crime groups to control territory.

“If you don't see anything, hear anything or say anything, then you can live to be 100 here,” a sexagenarian resident of Ostia told AFP, declining to give his name.

“But if you want to change things, then you are going to have some major problems ahead,” he added.

“That should have happened a lot earlier. These problems are enrooted and now it's no good lopping off a branch because another will grow and the tree will be just the same.”

The attack on Piervincenzi didn't just upset fellow journalists. Ostia residents also turned out to defend freedom of expression.

“Let's just say that the presence of the press has forced law enforcement to lift the lid on the issue,” Silvia Frau, a resident, told AFP.

“I hope they stay once the media rush is over,” she added.

However, another local passing by said that the reporter “was looking for it and he got it”.

“He should have known when to stop. He was too insistent, he wanted to dig a little too deep”.

Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi, of the populist Five Star Movement, was one of the first politicians to react to the attack, calling the violence unacceptable and pledging a crackdown on crime.

“Spada's arrest is proof that there are no lawless areas in Italy,” the interior ministry said in a statement.

CasaPound came fourth in Sunday's first round voting in the municipal elections and is hoping to do better in the second round on November 19th.

It is calling on voters to kick out Raggi who it claims “hasn't even managed to move an abandoned mattress in 18 months”.

The Spada clan is notoriously violent. Seven members of the family were sentenced to a combined 56 years in jail in October, and Roberto's brother Carmine was ordered to serve 10 years last year for extortion and mafia association.

CasaPound insists that is all part of a campaign to discredit the movement.

“What CasaPound has done on the ground is anti-mafia work, anti-organised crime,” the group's vice president Simone Di Stefano said Thursday.

READ ALSO: Mobster arrested after attacking journalist in Italy

TRAIN

Trial to begin over Paris train attack that inspired movie

A Moroccan man goes on trial in France on Monday accused of an attempted terror attack on an Amsterdam-Paris train five years ago which was foiled by passengers whose heroic actions were turned into a Hollywood film.

Published: 14 November 2020 09:14 CET
Trial to begin over Paris train attack that inspired movie
Off-duty US servicemen Spencer Stone and Alek Skarlatos (left and right) and their friend Anthony Sadler (centre), who helped tackle the attacker. Photo: Thomas Samson/AFP
Director Clint Eastwood, 90, is on the witness list for the trial in Paris, and it is believed his 2018 film “The 15:17 to Paris” will serve as a reconstruction of the events of August 21, 2015.
   
Ayoub El Khazzani was tackled by passengers, including two off-duty American servicemen, shortly after emerging bare-chested and heavily armed from a toilet on a Thalys high-speed train.
   
Some 150 passengers were in the carriage with him.
   
Khazzani had an AK47 slung over his back, a bag of nearly 300 rounds of ammunition, and appeared to be “in a trance”, according to a young Frenchman waiting in the passageway, and the first to try to subdue Khazzani.
   
Another passenger, a Franco-American professor, came to the Frenchman's aid, grabbing Khazzani's assault rifle.
   
The attacker took a pistol out of his belt, shot and wounded the professor and reclaimed the AK47, only to be tackled afresh and disarmed by two American soldiers — Spencer Stone and Alek Skarlatos — who heard the commotion from a neighbouring carriage.
   
The soldiers were aided by their friend Anthony Sadler, with whom they were backpacking through Europe.
 
   
Stone was slashed in the neck and on the eyebrow and almost had his thumb sliced off with a box-cutter wielded by Khazzani.
   
“He had 270 rounds of ammunition on him, enough to kill 300 people,” according to Thibault de Montbrial, the lawyer for the three Americans hoping to attend the trial at a special anti-terror court from Monday.
   
According to the lawyer, there was no doubt his clients had prevented a “mass attack.”
   
Khazzani, who joined the Islamic State group in Syria in May 2015, is charged with “attempted terrorist murder”, and will be joined in the dock by three other men accused of helping him.
   
De Montbrial said the Americans, who played themselves in Eastwood's film, wish to attend the trial because they “want to tell” their story and “look into the eyes of the man they faced”.
   
However, they may not make it to Paris due to coronavirus restrictions.
 
 
'Remain calm'
 
The Thalys assault happened in the same year as the January 2015 massacre of staff at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, the killing of a policewoman, and the deadly hostage siege at the Hyper Cacher market — which left a total of 17 dead.
   
In November the same year, jihadists armed with assault rifles and explosives struck outside the national stadium, Paris cafes and the Bataclan concert hall, killing 130 people and wounding more than 350 in the deadliest peacetime attack in France's history.
   
Belgian Abdelhamid Abaaoud is believed to have been one of the masterminds behind the Thalys and November 13 attacks, as well as others in Europe, including the Brussels bombings of March 2016 that killed 32 civilians.
   
Abaaoud was killed by police in a Paris suburb five days after he shot indiscriminately at packed cafe terraces in Paris on the night of the coordinated November 13 attacks.
   
The Khazzani trial comes at a time of heightened security alert in France following three attacks blamed on jihadists in a month — a knife attack outside Charlie Hebdo's former offices, the beheading of a history teacher, and a deadly stabbing spree at a church in Nice.
   
“We must remain calm and rigorous regardless of recent tragedies,” said Lea Dordilly, a lawyer for co-accused Bilal Chatra, who was 19 at the time of the thwarted train attack.
   
He was allegedly recruited in Turkey by Abaaoud, and is suspected of being an advance scout for Khazzani in getting into Europe via the migrant trail from Syria.
   
Khazzani does not deny having boarded the train with the intent of committing an attack, but claims to have had a change of heart at the last minute, too late to avoid the confrontation with the Americans.
   
His lawyer Sarah Mauger-Poliak claims Khazzani is a changed man who has rejected radical Islamist doctrine and regrets his actions.
   
The trial is scheduled to last until December 17.
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