Italy: bus driver threatens to set pupils on fire
A bus driver hijacked a bus carrying 51 schoolchildren near Milan on Wednesday and threatened to douse them with fuel and set them alight. The police were able to prevent this. The perpetrator, an Italian citizen of Senegalese origin, apparently uploaded a video beforehand with the message: "Africa, rise up!" Commentators discuss to what extent the crime is linked to Italy's immigration policy.
Don't evoke a clash of civilisations
Given that the attacker had a criminal record the first question should be whether he should have been employed as a bus driver in the first place, deputy editor Venanzio Postiglione writes in Corriere della Sera:
“The one side equates immigrants with criminality. The other criticises Matteo Salvini for adding fuel to the fire. Yet there is a different route that, however, entails a little work and analysis. ... The driver's past needs to be examined, as well as the checks carried out in order to understand what and when something went wrong. Sometimes far more trivial things lead to a purported clash of civilisations, such as an omitted check, an ignored report or a missing detail.”
Migration becoming a security factor
La Stampa's editor-in-chief Maurizio Molinari fears a whole new category of terror may be coming:
“Those responsible for prevention in our country must confront the prospect of a new category of threats and attackers, very different from the familiar categories of jihadists or white racists. Action must be taken also at the political level. To be effective the zero tolerance for terrorism must be accompanied by measures that prevent it in the first place. In the case of immigration this means finding integration models that are so efficient that they reinforce collective security rather than weakening it. ... We must therefore see dealing with migration as a matter of national security that can't be left to the antagonism between NGOs and politicians.”