A 34-year-old Afghan migrant accused of sexually assaulting two underage girls at an Italian beach has been released by a judge just a day after his arrest.
The Afghan admitted to touching one of the girls while swimming but was able to convince the judge to release him from jail, despite calls by the prosecutor to keep the 34-year-old in pre-trial detention.
The incident is said to have taken place on Monday at the Curvone beach in Ostia near Rome. The Afghan is accused of approaching the girls while they were in the water, attempting to joke with them before groping one of the girls and then touching the other, Il Giornale reports.
The girls cried out after the alleged assault, which brought the attention of the nearby bathers who, in turn, alerted the local Carabinieri in the area.
The Afghan attempted to leave the area as the officers approached but was arrested near the beach after the girls gave officers a description of the man.
While the judge in the case released the Afghan after just a day, claiming he was not dangerous, the Afghan was banned from staying in Rome and scheduled for another hearing in the case next month.
Whether he obeys the ban and shows up for the hearing remains to be seen, however.
Migrant sex attacks in pools and at beaches have become more frequent since the apex of the 2015-16 migrant crisis, including a now infamous case of an Iraqi who raped a ten-year-old boy in a Vienna swimming pool and tried to justify his actions by claiming it was a “sexual emergency.”
Italy has also seen similar attacks, such as the rape of a Polish woman in August of 2017 on a beach in Rimini in which a group of suspected North African migrants beat the woman’s boyfriend unconscious before raping her multiple times.
Earlier this year in June, more sex attacks took place aboard a train in Lake Garda, and a mob of around 2,000 or so migrant-background youths wreaked havoc on towns along the lake. Six teenage girls between the ages of 16 and 17 reported by sexually assaulted aboard the train by multiple young men.