By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Police in Italy have arrested an Italian man who killed a Nigerian vendor, Alika Ogorchukwu in a brutal physical assault, resulting to his death along a busy beach town thoroughfare.
Onlookers instead filmed the gory scene without any attempt to rescue the helpless Nigerian national.
Video footage of the attack has circulated widely on Italian news websites and social media, eliciting outrage.
This comes at a moment Italy enters a parliamentary election campaign in which the right-wing coalition has already made immigration an issue.
“The murder of Alika Ogorchukwu is dismaying,” Enrico Letta, the head of the left-wing Democratic Party, wrote Saturday on Twitter, naming the vendor who died Friday. “Unheard of ferocity. Widespread indifference. There can be no justification.”
Right-wing leader Matteo Salvini, who is making security a plank of his campaign, also expressed outrage over the death, saying “security has no color and … needs to return to being a right.”
Ogorchukwu, 39, was selling goods on Friday on the main street of Civitanova Marche, a beach town on the Adriatic Sea, when his attacker grabbed the vendor’s crutch and struck him down, according to police.
Video shows the assailant wrestling the victim onto his back on the pavement as he fought back, eventually subduing Ogorchukwu with the weight of his body.
“The aggressor went after the victim, first hitting him with a crutch. He made him fall to the ground, then he finished, causing the death, hitting him repeatedly with his bare hands,″ the town’s chief commissioner, Fabio Mazza, told a press conference.
Police investigator Matteo Luconi told Italian news channel Sky TG24 that onlookers called police, who responded after the suspect had fled and attempted to administer aid to the victim.
Police used street cameras to track the assailant’s movements and detained a man identified as Filippo Claudio Giuseppe Ferlazzo, 32. He was being held on suspicion of murder and theft for allegedly taking the victim’s phone.
Luconi told Sky TG24 that the assailant lashed out after the vendor made “insistent” requests for pocket change. Police were questioning witnesses and viewing videos of the attack. They said the suspect has made no statement.
Ogorchukwu, who was married with two children, resorted to selling goods on the street after he was struck by a car and lost his job as a laborer due to his injuries, said Daniel Amanza, who runs the ACSIM association for immigrants in the Marche region’s Macerata province.
Civitanova Marche’s mayor, Fabrizio Ciarapica, met with members of the Nigerian community after hundreds demonstrated on Saturday.
“My condemnation is not only for the (crime) but it is also for the indifference,″ Ciarapica told Sky. ”This is something that has shocked citizens.”
