The Muslim asylum seeker was apprehended on Friday in the northern Italian port city of Pesaro. In Rome, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini repeated his promise to deport such “delinquents”.
“A Pakistani ‘asylum-seeker’ has been arrested, caught in Pesaro by the police with 180 doses of heroin! Disgusting! All-out war on death dealers! Zero tolerance, get these delinquents out of Italy!” he tweeted late on Friday night. Salvini’s tweet included a photo of the drugs that were confiscated.
🔴Arrestato un “richiedente asilo” pakistano, beccato a Pesaro dalla Polizia con 180 dosi di eroina!
CHE SCHIFO!
Guerra totale agli spacciatori di morte!#tolleranzazero, FUORI dall’Italia questi delinquenti!!! pic.twitter.com/1aub5XoMd0— Matteo Salvini (@matteosalvinimi) April 12, 2019
The Italian government passed the Security and Immigration Decree – known as the Salvini Decree – last year, tightening existing immigration legislation.
Among the Decree’s provisions for asylum applicants, refugee status is denied in cases where the migrant is involved in criminal proceedings or convicted for any offence, and the police commissioner must immediately inform the relevant Territorial Commission.
The Commission will make a ruling on the criminal’s case and if it rejects the asylum application, the migrant must leave the country, even if an appeal against the deportation may be pending.
The Decree explicitly denies international protection status for migrants who have committed crimes of sexual violence, serious bodily harm, violence against a public official, aggravated robbery, or drug trafficking.
Statistics from Italian police have shown that around one-fifth of the total arrests made last year in the country involved migrants — around one in five people. The total foreign population of Italy is 8,7 percent or less than one in ten, according to Italian official demographic statistics.
The number of crimes committed by foreigners in Italy is much higher according to a 2018 report, revealing that as many as one in three crimes is committed by a foreigner.
According to the report, some 5 173 people were arrested by Italian police last year and of those, 990 were foreign-born nationals, Italian dailyIl Giornale reported.
Albanians and Nigerians are the largest ethnic groups represented in the statistics followed by Moroccans, Romanians, and Tunisians.
Italy is stuggling with the rise of Nigerian mafia gangs, part of a much larger network in Nigeria and Libya which coordinating in the trafficking of women into Italy illegally to work the streets as prostitutes.
Italian criminologist Alessandro Meluzzi highlighted the brutality of the Nigerian mafia after the dismemberment of Italian teen Pamela Mastropietro by a Nigerian drug dealer.
“What we have seen in the case of Pamela are the same methods the Nigerian mafia systematically employs in Nigeria and elsewhere. It is a routine to cut victims into pieces and, in some cases, to eat parts of their bodies,” Meluzzi explained.