MASSAROSA. It was 3 AM on Sunday (July 19, ed.) in via Rontani, in the hamlet of Bozzano (municipality of Massarosa), when a young couple in their thirties – both locals – heard a knock at the door of the apartment they had rented. The girl went to open it, asking who it was at that hour presenting themselves at the entrance of the house. Standing before her was a 31-year-old Romanian man. He asked for a person – a compatriot, according to investigative sources – who had allegedly stayed in one of those apartments in the past. He didn’t know that there was no trace of that man there anymore; he insisted on asking for information, even in the face of the woman’s denial. Then he pushed the door and entered. And for the couple, a night of pure terror began.
The Kidnapping
During the three hours the man held them captive, under the threat of two long kitchen knives he had with him, he repeatedly subjected the girl to violence in front of her boyfriend, fondling and touching her intimate parts, even biting her arm. For him, arrested in flagrante delicto at 6 AM by the State Police patrol from the Viareggio police station, immediate transfer to Prato prison was ordered: he will face very serious charges such as kidnapping, sexual violence, illegal possession of weapons, resisting a public official, and aggravated damage.
Violence and Threats
Once inside the apartment, the man indeed pulled out the two blades – which he had hidden in the large pockets of his trousers – and pointed them at the backs of the two fiancés. He then confiscated their mobile phones, taking them away and thus preventing the couple from immediately calling for help. And he continued, insistently, to ask for information about the man he was looking for.
Investigators are conducting thorough inquiries to try and understand the connection between the aggressor and this fourth person. The hypothesis currently being examined is that the 31-year-old Romanian’s infiltration into the apartment on via Rontani was driven by the need to meet this very person, perhaps for a settling of scores. However, the couple, being guests in the apartment, knew nothing about previous tenants. They also denied knowing him. But the 31-year-old did not give up. “You’re covering for him, tell me where he is!” he yelled in their faces. And then he turned on the girl, taking advantage of the situation that placed him in a “position of power” over the couple.
Indeed, in front of her boyfriend’s eyes, almost as if to torture both of them to force them to provide information, he laid his hands on the woman’s body. With the knife pointed at her back, the young woman could do nothing but endure the 31-year-old’s violence. Three hours passed like a horror movie.
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The Misstep
Then, suddenly, the kidnapper decided to go out: he wanted to buy cigarettes. He took the girl hostage once again, threatening her partner if he called the police. “I’ll make her come to a bad end,” he told him, before forcing the woman to accompany him by car to a nearby vending machine: according to the reconstruction made by the police, the violence against the woman continued non-stop even in the car. But in all this, he made a mistake: he left the mobile phones he had taken from the two fiancés in the house.
Police Intervention
The man, left alone, did not give in to the threats. He took his mobile phone and called 112. From the Viareggio police station, the operation was immediately launched: the patrol car set off towards via Rontani while the personnel on the phone suggested to the thirty-year-old to tell the man, upon his return, that he had managed to contact the person he was looking for: he had to tell him that the man was coming there, was willing to meet him but outside, in the garden of the house. When the kidnapper returned, the boy played the part perfectly, managing to convince him. So the 31-year-old opened the apartment door, let the two fiancés out, and then went out into the garden himself. It was at that moment that the flying squad officers pounced on him, pinning him to the ground and disarming him.
A struggle ensued; the arrested man did everything to resist the police, who with great difficulty dragged him into the car. And even once inside the vehicle, the man’s violence erupted on the vehicle, which was damaged internally. Taken to the police station and identified (he already had several previous convictions), the 31-year-old was then transferred to Prato prison where he is awaiting, these days, the preliminary interrogation by prosecutor Enrico Corucci of the Lucca Public Prosecutor’s Office.
“As a woman, as a mayor, and as a human being, I can only express solidarity with the two young people and especially with the woman victim of violence,” commented the mayor of Massarosa, Simona Barsotti – “I am shocked by what happened: experiences like these mark not only those who live them but the entire community. This couple was quietly spending a weekend, and instead, they found themselves living a nightmare.”
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