Italy police arrest refugee as last suspect in beach gang rape

Associated Press

ROME

A Congolese asylum-hopeful with permission to stay in Italy for humanitarian reasons was nabbed aboard a train by police early Sunday as the last of a gang of four young males suspected of raping a Polish tourist on a beach, beating her companion unconscious and raping a Peruvian woman barely an hour later in the same Italian resort town of Rimini, authorities said.

The man, identified as Guerlin Butungu, 20, was the only adult among the four suspects under arrest in the brutal case that triggered calls from Poland for the death penalty for the culprits and fueled already growing anti-migrant sentiment in Italy, where hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers have been given shelter over the past few years after rescue at sea from migrant smugglers’ boats.

Rimini police Chief Maurizio Improta described Butungu’s arrest aboard a train at Rimini station. “The arrest this morning was doubly satisfying because putting the handcuffs on the fourth man were two women” police officers. “This symbolic gesture rendered justice to the victims of the violence,” he said.

Investigators were quoted as saying Butungu hoped to travel through Milan and then on to France to escape capture.