Two American students were raped after being separated by opportunistic attackers, aged 18 and 19, as they returned to their hotel in the city of Syracuse, Sicily.
The suspects, who were described as locals, are now in police custody.
The horror unfolded on the night of July 3. The victims were returning from spending the night in the Ortigia district of the city and were in the marina area when they were boarded.
The attackers were on a motorbike. According to reports from Sicily, the victims were trying to use a cigarette vending machine, but were unable to do so because Italian machines require the buyer to present a national identity document to prove their age.
The two American citizens were separated when one of the boys offered them a card to use. That’s when the attacks occurred.
The attack here, in the city of Syracuse, on the island of Sicily.
Italian police arrested the two men in a pair of dawn raids on the morning of July 5.
One of the women was attacked near the marina, while the other is believed to have been taken to a house where she suffered the same fate.
The two victims went to police the morning after they were attacked. The Syracuse Vice Squad launched an investigation and quickly identified the two men.
They were arrested in the early hours of July 5, charged with aggravated sexual assault and taken to a local jail.
The victims are in Italy for study purposes. A statement from the public prosecutor’s office says the attackers took advantage of the two women’s lack of knowledge of Italian to plan the attack.
The accounts of the two women were supported by witness statements, as well as by investigations carried out at the scene of the incident, they report. Corriere Del Mezzogiorno.
The U.S. State Department currently has Italy under a level two travel alert, meaning travelers should exercise “increased caution” for American citizens, but because of the potential for increased terrorism, not crime.
In April, a Canadian woman was raped in Palermo, Sicily’s largest city, at the B&B where she was staying.
The victim reportedly told police she met one of the two men, who was a hospital porter, while visiting her boyfriend in the hospital after he suffered a minor injury.
The woman told officers that she and the doorman started talking and that she invited him back to her hostel. The tourist described him as “very nice” but “after a certain point I can’t remember anything,” ANSA reported.
In 2019, an American woman was dragged out of a bar by three Sicilian men and brutally gang-raped in a nearby parking lot. three attackers They were sentenced to four years in prison after appealing their initial seven-year sentences.
Last month, two Italian soccer players, Mattia Lucarelli, son of Italian leftist soccer icon Cristiano Ronaldo, and Federico Apolloni, were sentenced to more than three and a half years in prison for gang-raping an American woman in a Milan apartment.
