Men arrested for beating Egyptians

(ANSA) - Rome, August 23 - 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.