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CRIME

Italy to prosecute TikTokers who faked illness to hitch ambulance ride

Two Italian TikTokers who faked being ill to hitch an ambulance ride to the nearby town before posting footage of the episode on social media will be prosecuted, police said on Friday.

Published: 14 July 2023 17:58 CEST
Ambulance Italy
Ambulance vehicles lined up outside the main emergency access of an Italian hospital. File photo by ANDREAS SOLARO / AFP

The TikTok video – captioned “When you’re out in the countryside and there’s no public transport” – racked up over 50,000 views in just one day.

The footage, shot last Sunday by the 19- and 20-year-old men, starts with one of them saying “we’re lost in the middle of the countryside, and now we’re solving the problem”.

One contacts the emergency services and says his friend has fainted, while the other can be seen lying on a bench stifling laughter.

The pair then filmed the arrival of the ambulance, which took them to the seaside town of Riccione in northeast Italy, where they spent a brief amount of time in the accident and emergency department, according to ANSA news agency.

Police identified them from the video and said they would be prosecuted after the regional health agency filed a complaint.

“I’m an idiot, I shouldn’t have done that”, one of the men was quoted as telling the local Il Resto del Carlino newspaper.

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CRIME

Italian police bust gang using luxury cars to smuggle Chinese migrants

The Chinese trafficking network used luxury cars to smuggle people into Italy before confiscating their passports and treating them like slaves, police said.

Published: 27 June 2024 10:28 CEST
Italian police bust gang using luxury cars to smuggle Chinese migrants

The smugglers had the migrants pose as “unsuspecting Asian citizens, well-dressed, with little luggage, travelling in powerful and expensive cars, driven by Chinese citizens who had lived in Italy for years and spoke Italian”, police said in a statement on Wednesday.

Investigators were alerted to a possible ring after a Chinese citizen was stopped at the border between Italy and Slovenia in April during routine checks, and found to be transporting four undocumented Chinese.

A probe uncovered “the existence of a consistent, continuous flow of irregular Chinese citizens who, in small groups, were flown to the external European borders in countries (mainly Serbia) where they entered with a visa exemption”, the statement said.

“And then, from there, they were accompanied by car, through Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia, up to the Italian state border”, it said.

Smuggled migrants were transported to a safehouse near Venice, where they stayed for one or two days before being taken on either to areas of Italy or other European Union countries like France and Spain.

The traffickers confiscated their passports at the safehouse and “from then on… (they) were exposed to severe exploitation until the debt incurred for the journey had been repaid”, the statement said.

The migrants were kept “without any possibility of a free or semi-free life, without medical assistance, with nothing except a bed and a place to work indefinitely,” police said, describing it as a sort of “slavery”.

Police arrested nine alleged members of the trafficking network during the operation and identified 77 undocumented migrants, “many of them women and some minors aged between 15 and 18”.

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