Italian police nab asylum seeker after tourist gang-raped on beach

A Congolese man who was seeking asylum after being rescued at sea and taken to Italy in 2015 was arrested on a train early on Sunday as the last 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 resort town of Rimini, authorities said.

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

Rimini police Chief Maurizio Improta described Butungu’s arrest on a train passing through 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.”

Corriere della Sera daily reported that Butungu had a knife with him when captured. A few hours earlier, he had been spotted in a nearby Adriatic Sea resort town, Pesaro, riding a bicycle then fleeing into a park.

It said his mobile phone use helped investigators to track him down on the train. Investigators were quoted as saying Butungu hoped to travel through Milan and then on to France to escape capture.