Italian revenge: Bomb attack against Romanian store

During the last night, a bomb attack against a store owned by a Romanian immigrant took place in the village of Villalba, in the Guidonia Montecelio region, near the place where six Romanian rapists were almost lynched recently. The home-made device was placed near a butcher’s shop with Romanian products.

Contacted by HotNews.ro, the Carabinieri (local Police force) in Tivoli confirmed the attack, mentioning that the incident was reported over an hour later. There were no casualties, since the store was closed at the time.

Adrian Nechifor, owner of the store, says that the shop window and the refrigerators were affected. „I expected this to happen, because of the atmosphere created and the hate we feel around us. We, Romanians, are afraid we’ll suffer because of the actions of some fools. But we need to go on.

What we need to do next is to stop being so divided, to be more united. To love more our friends and relatives. By sticking together, we would let people know we’re strong, but Italians now see we’re divided. When you see Tunisians or Moroccans on the street, they look like brothers, they act as if they have known each other for their entire lives. Romanians are each one on his own”, Nechifor considers.

The Romanian community reacted promptly to the incident in Villalba. The Romanians’ Party in Italy and the Romanian Associations Organization in Rome (Assoforum) issued a common press release calling for the end of ethnic hate.

„The Italian media must stop pouring poison in the common springs of Italian and Romanian co-habitation, stop providing biased information and stop fueling the fire of ethnic intolerance”, the release reads. „The rape is an odious crime and must be convicted as such, regardless the nationality of the criminal. We can’t have different measures for the poor Italian boy who made a mistake and the barbarian invader from Romania”.

„Over 1 million Romanians live in Italy, with a crime rate of 0.27, not proportional with the alarmist news in the Italian media, which keeps on pointing at the crime rate among Romanians. The bomb attack in Villalba di Guidonia is a serious signal that can’t be ignored, because it affects people that have no other fault than belonging to a certain nationality”.

Father Ion Florea, priest in Guidonia- Tivoli, also says that Romanians are scared and the tension persists in the area. „As Christians, we are on the side of the victims of the rape. But Romanians in Guidonia fear that they will be put in the same category with the perpetrators. Moist Romanians in Tivoli are well-integrated. The children go to school, Romanians work with the integration institutions and associations”, says the priest.

On January 27, a pub managed by a Romanian woman was also attacked by a masked man who threw in a Molotov cocktail. The pub was closed and the owner declared that she fears for her own and her family’s safety.