Violence erupted outside a Milan asylum office in the early morning hours of Monday as around 600 migrants gathered, with riot police being forced to act to maintain order.
The group of 600 migrants gathered along the Via Cagni ahead of the opening of the asylum offices, with tents being set up and made into a makeshift camp as migrants wait in line.
Police had been threatened by many of the migrants waiting in the area, as well as being spat upon and subjected to intimidation. Tensions mounted to the point that riot police were forced to charge the migrants twice during the morning to maintain order, Il Giornale reports.
Italian MP Riccardo De Corato, a member of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy (FdI), commented on the situation at the asylum office saying, “I don’t see why you can’t send these people elsewhere, whether in Lombardy or Piedmont, Veneto and other regions. Why concentrate this amount of African asylum seekers in Milan and Via Cagni?”
“Monday in Via Cagni is hell and the residents of that whole area of Niguarda must not suffer consequences of this kind. In addition, the prefecture of Milan has to deal with a huge amount of asylum requests and I do not think it is right to concentrate everything there, especially because it then becomes clogged,” he added.
Member of the European Parliament Silvia Sardone, a member of populist Matteo Salvini’s League, added: “Monday morning does not pass without the State Police being forced to intervene to disperse the hundreds of immigrants who put pressure on the barracks in Via Cagni to ask for new documents: problems that are repeated every week and to which the municipality is not giving any answer in support of the officers.”
The tensions at the asylum office came just hours after riots took place outside a deportation detention centre (CPR) currently housing around 40 migrants set for deportation, with the violence taking place following a demonstration by far-left anarchist extremists in the city.
Riccardo De Corato claimed that many of the migrants coming to Italy illegally had been let out of prisons in their home countries saying, “People who landed only a week ago in Italy turn out to have precedents in their countries of origin. This means that someone sends them to us, that these boats are loaded with people who have committed crimes.”
De Corato has also called for Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi to do more to keep the anarchist “social centres” in check to prevent extremists from organising possible future riots.
Anarchists in Italy have been also linked to recent violence against police in Rome and Milan in connection to the hunger strike of far-left anarchist terrorist Alfredo Cospito, currently in prison for bombing a Carabinieri barracks and shooting the head of a nuclear power company.
Cospito has been on hunger strike after he was placed in the highly restrictive 41-bis prison regime, which greatly limits his contact with the outside world. He was placed under the regime after sending letters to supporters outright glorifying violence and terrorism.