Rayen Wasti, a 20-year-old Tunisian man living illegally in northern Italy, has been known by police for some time due to his criminal activity. His reputation earned him an order to avoid accessing the area around the city of Padua’s train station—described by a local paper as “the favourite area for his violence.” But the police order did nothing to stop the man from trespassing. He is now “seriously suspected” of having committed five acts of sexual assault.
The 20-year-old is reported to have used hashish and alcohol to take advantage of women he already held physical authority over.
Local paper Il Mattino di Padova notes that in one case, Wasti and an accomplice are accused of having “deceived” a woman into an isolated area where she was sexually assaulted. In another instance, he forced himself on top of a woman, “preventing her from finding the strength to call for help.” The man is also said to have raped a woman who, due to his grooming, was “impaired by drugs and alcohol.”
One case involves a 17-year-old girl who Wasti is alleged to have groped against a wall. The girl showed evidence of having been drugged, molested, and abandoned.
National reports add that these incidents meant women had become “afraid” to go to the area of the train station alone.
Milan paper Il Giornale comments that these cases “[force] anyone who really cares about the security of the country to ask questions”—Not least among them is why authorities did not act earlier; it appears, for example, that Wasti’s order not to access the Padua station was not policed.
But before the police report, Wasti had been arrested and reported twice for drug dealing. Northeast paper Corriere del Veneto highlights a “banal detail” that affected the efforts of the police:
Every time that [man] was stopped or arrested, in fact, that [man] declared himself a minor of Libyan origins, managing to avoid pre-trial detention in prison and other more severe restrictive measures.
However, the bone exam ordered by the Padua prosecutor’s office and the communication that arrived in recent days from the Tunisian consulate in Milan have erased any doubts: that [man] was born in 2003, therefore he is of age.
This case undoubtedly raises questions over the process of verifying the age of migrants where there might be some dispute. But policy guides, including those from the Council of Europe (CE), put power very much in the hands of migrants suspected of wrongdoing. A section of a 2019 CE paper on age assessment stresses the importance of the “presumption of minority;” that, as the United Nations states, “anyone claiming to be a child should be treated as such.”
“Children,” it says (counting those too who lie about their age), should “never be detained while age assessment results are pending.” And such an assessment cannot take place at all “without the informed consent of the person.”
Policymakers are told to “consider” that a migrant could be lying about their age to escape abuses, such as from people traffickers. There is not a word on the possibility of an individual lying to escape justice.
Now that the law has caught up—too late—with Wasti, investigations, according to Il Mattino di Padova, have suggested he is “unable to control and curb sexual impulses.”
Wasti, having delayed justice by successfully lying about his age on numerous occasions and succeeding again in entering an area—around the train station—forbidden to him by police, is now in prison. But a second, unidentified attacker in one of the five cases remains free.
Corriere del Veneto describes Wasti as having “believed himself above the law”—the relevant aspects of which EU officials appear to have no desire to alter.
