A Tunisian migrant who confessed to stabbing a barber to death in Pisa is sad to have been arrested at least ten times in the past and had deportation orders but despite this, was never removed from the country.
Tunisian Mourad Talbi confessed to stabbing Moroccan barber Halim Hamza to death with a blade around eight inches long on August 7th, killing the barber without saying a word to him beforehand.
The 37-year-old had already been arrested at least ten times by Italian authorities for various crimes including drug dealing and violence and had been ordered to leave the country several times by Italian authorities, yet still remained, Il Giornale reports.
The exact motivation for the killing remains unclear, although the Tunisian claimed to have been a victim of abuse by an acquaintance of the man he fatally stabbed. Investigators, whoever, remain sceptical of the man’s story, suspecting the man may have planned the murder and are continuing to investigate.
Populist anti-mass migration League leader Matteo Salvini reacted to the incident on social media stating, “Arrested ten times, without being expelled. Let’s go back to protecting our cities and our citizens, we can’t tolerate such a shame.”
Raffaella Bonsangue, deputy mayor of Pisa and a member of Giorgia Meloni’s national-conservative Brother of Italy (FdI), noted that both the victim and the alleged murderer were immigrants but pointed out the difference between them.
“Both subjects were immigrants, but one was a worker who contributed to the economy of our city, and the other was a dangerous subject, well known to the police, who tarnished the reputation of so many decent people who arrived in our country with the prospect of building a future,” she said.
The FdI and their firebrand socially conservative leader Giorgia Meloni are far ahead of their centre-right coalition allies, including Salvini’s League, but Salvini himself has made a point to campaign on tackling illegal immigration.
Salvini noted that last month in July, Italy had seen more illegal immigrant arrivals than the entire year of 2019, during most of which he served as Interior Minister and was credited with reducing illegal arrivals and drownings at sea.
Past data has also revealed that migrants commit far more crimes than Italians relative to their population, with a report from January claiming that migrants make up one-third of all of the prisoners in the Italian prison system.