Italian authorities are investigating allegations that young women, including at least one from Britain, were molested by gangs of men carrying Palestinian and other flags on New Year’s Eve.
Six young Belgian tourists who were on holiday in Milan claim they were surrounded by a group of around 40 men and subjected to a terrifying ordeal in which the men put their hands up their skirts and tops.
The men are suspected to have molested other women, including some Italians and an unknown number of tourists from Spain and South America.
Among the victims was a young British woman who was in the city that night with her boyfriend, according to Sudinfo, a Belgian news outlet.
‘Collective harassment’
Police want to find out whether the attacks were planned and coordinated. Italian media reports on Friday cited a concept known in Arabic as ‘taharrush gamea’ or ‘taharrush jama’i’, which translates literally as ‘collective harassment’.
Italian police have travelled to Liege in Belgium to interview the women.
They have obtained video footage of the alleged attacks in Milan’s main square, Piazza del Duomo, which they hope will help identify the alleged assailants.
A similar attack was reported by numerous women during New Year’s Eve celebrations in Milan in 2022.
The molestation was allegedly carried out by a group of around 50 young men who were of North African or South Asian origin. The mass assault was reminiscent of sexual attacks carried out by young migrant men on New Year’s Eve in Cologne in 2016, both in the way the assaults were organised and the ethnic origin of the perpetrators.
‘A night of horror’
In the most recent alleged assaults in Milan, the women said they were suddenly surrounded by around 40 men, some of them carrying flags from Palestine, Turkey, Iraq and Pakistan, who shoved their hands inside their clothes.
Laura Barbier, 20, one of the young Belgian women who was allegedly attacked, told Belgian media: “What was meant to be a night of fun turned into a night of horror. We were trapped and helpless in the face of such violence. They held our arms up in the air while others touched us all over, including beneath our clothes, despite us wearing jackets and scarves. It lasted about 10 minutes, which seemed never-ending in such a situation.”
She said she was saved by a middle-aged Italian man whose wife was also molested. He pulled them away from the crowd of alleged assailants and hurried them to safety.
Silvia Scurati, a regional politician, denounced the attacks and said they reflected “a failure of integration of second-generation migrant youths”.
‘Touched us everywhere’
In the Cologne attacks of 2016, dozens of women and girls reported being sexually assaulted by a crowd of around 1,000 North African and Arab men. The mass attacks came just months after the Merkel government had welcomed more than a million migrants and refugees.
One young woman, called Michelle, described how she and her friends were surrounded by up to 30 men. “They grabbed our arms… pushed our clothes away, and tried to get between our legs or I don’t know where.”
Another woman told German television: “All of a sudden these men around us began groping us. They touched our behinds and grabbed between our legs. They touched us everywhere.”
Police were nowhere to be seen, she said. “I thought to myself that if we stay here in this crowd they could kill us, they could rape us and nobody would notice.”
The German authorities received more than 1,200 complaints of criminal behaviour, more than 500 of them involving sexual assault. There were 28 allegations of rape or attempted rape. Similar attacks took place in Hanover, Hamburg and Frankfurt.
The chaotic nature of the situation, however, meant that very few men were prosecuted and convicted. Although 290 men were investigated by public prosecutors, only 32 were convicted, largely for crimes such as theft. Only two were found guilty of sexual assault: an Iraqi and an Algerian, both in their twenties.