Mayor of Castelnuovo Giovanni Del Cero was present during the rioting and said, “I tried to understand but they shouted absurd phrases, waving flags of various African countries,”

Orietta Gaiulli, the mayor of Peschiera, commented on the chaos saying, “I don’t know if they were first or second-generation immigrants. They are just a race of criminals who have left a deep wound in my community. We lived a day of war.”

Six teenage girls, aged between 16 and 17, also reported that members of the mob has boarded a train for Milan and were sexually harassed and assaulted by multiple young men.

“We were surrounded. The heat was suffocating, and some of us fainted,” one of the victims said and added that they were sexually assaulted while trying to move to a different train car and were told “White women don’t go up here.”

The attacks, which echo the sex attacks in Milan by young migrant and migrant-background men during New Year’s Eve, were condemned by Luca Zaia, governor of the Veneto Region, who called for zero tolerance for such behaviour and demanded police find those responsible.

“The idea must not pass that events like these can become ordinary or even, even worse, that we can become accustomed to it. We have never even adapted to the fact of putting alarms in the house and thinking of closing ourselves inside. I repeat, zero tolerance,” he said.