Photo: Zairon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Train staff all around Italy walked off the job on Tuesday, November 5th, in a protest over occupational safety following the stabbing of a train conductor by migrants.
According to Italian media reports, 44-year-old Rosario Ventura was attacked by a 21-year-old Egyptian man and a 16-year-old North African girl after they refused to pay for their fare on Monday afternoon.
On a regional train in northern Italy, Ventura was checking the validity of the passengers’ tickets, when a couple of migrants said they had not bought a ticket, and they would not pay for one either.
The migrants then verbally abused the conductor, spat on him, slapped and kicked him. Once the train stopped, and the couple were escorted off the vehicle, the Egyptian man stabbed Ventura twice in the left shoulder blade with a knife. The conductor was taken to hospital, where he remains in a serious, but stable condition. The couple tried to flee but were caught by the police.
The incident caused a huge uproar, and a strike was jointly called by six of Italy’s major transport unions. The unions complained that this was the latest in a series of “violent and repeated attacks” against rail workers in recent months. The “severity and intolerability” of these attacks “require firm and decisive action to protect the safety and well-being of the men and women who serve the public daily,” they added.
Italy’s transport minister Matteo Salvini, whose party, Lega, has advocated for tough anti-immigration measures, commented on the stabbing, writing on X:
No leniency for those responsible: these types of actions must not go unpunished. … After years of wrong choices by the Left, and open ports, we must return to rules and common sense.
Lega’s leaders in the Italian parliament, Riccardo Molinari and Massimiliano Romeo, decried the fact that left-wing judges make it impossible for the government to deport Egyptians by labelling Egypt as an “unsafe” country. Meanwhile, Egyptian migrants are free to do what they want in Italy.
On the Left side of the political spectrum, the reaction to Monday’s stabbing was predictable. While acknowledging that the continuous harassment of train staff is unacceptable, Andrea Casu of the Democratic Party stated that action must be taken against those who commit these crimes, “regardless of the colour of their skin and their nationality.”