Three Italian men accused of
severely beating four underage Egyptian asylum seekers on
Saturday claim to have been attacked and of having acted in
self-defense.
"Yes, we were the ones in the video but we are the victims
and not the attackers. They had baseball bats in hand and we
took them away," 18-year-old Antonino Spitale and the brothers
Giacomo (32) and Davide (23) Severo told Caltagirone preliminary
investigative judge Ettore Cavallaro on Tuesday.
One of the Egyptians, a 16-year-old, is in critical
condition.
The three Italians are being defended by the lawyer Pietro
Marino, who said that on leaving the Sicilian town of San Cono,
"seven or eight foreigners attacked the 18-year-old for trivial
reasons. The Severo brothers were passing by and they intervened
to help their friend. One of the two, who had a pistol in his
car with which he plays airsoft, took it in hand to make them
stop. They took their baseball bats away but those that remained
had bottles and stones and they attacked them. They (the
Italians, Ed) defended themselves. They were the victims."
The teenage victim named only as M.M. remains hospitalized
in a coma with a reserved prognosis after three Italian men
pistol-whipped and beat him and three friends with a baseball
bat in the Sicilian village of San Cono on Saturday afternoon.
The boy has undergone head surgery to drain a massive
haematoma. Two other Egyptians aged 16 and 17 were also slightly
injured in the attack. One of them filmed the aggression on his
mobile phone, allowing investigators to identify the attackers.
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