At least six people surrounded the provincial head of Forza Nuova, tying Ursino’s hands and feet with packing tape before savagely beating him. It happened in the busy and central Via Dante, around 7pm, with open shops and people along the sidewalk.
The attackers were dressed in black and had their faces covered with scarves. Among them, according to the witnesses, there was a girl who filmed the beating on a mobile phone. Taken to the emergency room of the Civic Hospital, Ursino’s face was covered in bruises and he was bleeding from a deep head wound.
The Forza Nuova executive is the owner of a tattoo studio in the nearby Via Marconi. The party had earlier sent a letter to the city’s prefect and mayor asking not to authorize the rally against the Forza Nuova leader, Roberto Fiore, expected next Saturday in the Sicilian capital.
In the afternoon, Forza Nuova issued a statement to respond to the Palermo anti-racism Forum. The forum counts several groups, with some twenty acronyms, including the ANPI.
“Beyond the alleged ‘fascist danger’ of this election campaign preceding the assault of tonight, it has evidently been marked by constant intimidation, exercised in different forms by the institutional left and leftist social centers aimed towards those who do not think like them. In Palermo last night, under the home of one of Forza Nuova’s political candidates, a group of ten armed people had waited for hours. We do not want a return to the climate of the 70s and 80s, but we will not be cowed by this. The important thing is that we respect the wishes of the majority.”
Ursino was in fact surrounded by half a dozen people and the group documented the beating with video images on a mobile phone.
The provincial leader of Forza Nuova, had in the past also been the victim of other attacks and damage to his shop. “I was tied up in the street”, Ursino confirmed to Italian daily la Repubblica from his hospital bed.
A militant from Forza Nuova, Giuseppe Provenzale, said: “We all know who they may have been, and mayor Orlando knows too.”
FN had raised the alarm even before the attack in a statement: “In Palermo after the incendiary attacks occurred in February last year, again against Forza Nuova, and the recent armed raid on the headquarters of an area association, there is an alarming and one-sided attempt to raise the level of animosity, a few days before the arrival in town of Roberto Fiore, which can not be ignored.
“After a campaign of hatred sown by the Espresso Group and followed by all the left including Liberi and Uguali, the communist hatred against Forza Nuova has been unleashed”.
Ursino was arrested in July 2006 for having “kidnapped and beaten” two Bangladeshi immigrants in the center of Palermo in front of the Teatro Massimo after they were involved in a robbery. Ursino was sentenced to two and a half years in prison.
In June 2005, with two other accomplices, Ursino had fought with a Nigerian in Via Candelai, also in the center of Palermo. The three were sent to trial for aggravated injuries committed for “racial reasons”.
The Forza Nuova executive in 2008 participated in the packaging and shipping of shock packages, sent to various newsrooms, containing a doll soiled with blood and animal entrails for the campaign of Forza Nuova against the abortion Law 194.
In February of last year someone tried to set fire to the Ursino tattoo studio causing damage to his tools. The FN executive told the police officers that he had heard the news from a friend of his while he was at the headquarters of the movement, in via Villa Florio, during a meeting.
While he was there, someone threw a fire bomb at the door of the offices causing the blackening of the frame but without causing injuries.