Prosecutors drop case against Salvini over migrants
In a video posted on Facebook, the anti-immigration leader of the League party read a letter from prosecutors in the Sicilian city of Catania informing him that they have formally asked a judge to drop the case
MILAN: Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said on Thursday that prosecutors have decided to drop charges laid against him after he refused to let 150 migrants disembark from a rescue ship docked in Sicily.
In a video posted on Facebook, the anti-immigration leader of the League party read a letter from prosecutors in the Sicilian city of Catania informing him that they had formally asked a judge to drop the case. He gave no reason for their decision.
Salvini had been placed under investigation for alleged abuse of power and holding people against their will after the Italian ship Diciotti was denied permission in August to let off migrants, mainly Eritrean, who had been rescued at sea.
Salvini had said he would refuse to let the migrants disembark until other European Union states agreed to take them in. The 10-day standoff ended when Ireland, Albania and the Roman Catholic Church agreed to take charge of some of the migrants.
About 650,000 people have reached Italian shores since 2014, mostly from Africa, and the country houses about 160,000 asylum seekers.
Salvini has led a popular crackdown against immigration since Italy’s coalition government took ofice in June.
Separately, German migration commissioner said that asylum seekers must be taught that Germany has zero tolerance for sex crimes following widespread shock over the rape of an 18-year-old woman that led to the arrest of seven Syrians.
“The perpetrators must be brought before a court and punished severely,” Annette Widmann-mauz, minister of state for migration, refugees and integration, told the RND news organisation.
German police arrested the seven Syrian men, aged 19 to 29, along with a 25-year-old German man last month on suspicion of raping the woman in the southwestern town of Freiburg.
One of the men is suspected of drugging the woman’s drink in a Freiburg nightclub before they all took turns at sexually assaulting her in a thicket outside.
The crime has shocked Freiburg, a picturesque university town, and risks stirring up anti-refugee sentiment across the country as the antiimmigration Alternative for Germany (AFD) seeks to cement itself as the leading opposition party.