Kidnapped and raped, she saved herself by throwing herself out of the window: three men arrested

It happened in Bologna. The woman had been lured into the house to smuggle cocaine. The three are accused of gang sexual assault and kidnapping

ROME – A flight of almost six meters in an attempt to escape the three men who had kidnapped her in an apartment in the center of Bologna and raped her. Then the arrival of help, alerted by the neighbors. It was from here that the investigations began which led the Carabinieri to arrest three boys: a 22-year-old Italian and two Tunisians, one just 18 and the other an adult. The latter, who arrived in Italy in 2023 as unaccompanied foreign minors, had met in the community that hosted both of them in Bologna.
The facts date back to May 29th.

The three boys, based on what was reconstructed by the military, decide to go in search of a sexual relationship and with this intention they hook up the victim on the street during the night: a 37-year-old Somali woman, homeless and habitual drug user. Precisely with the proposal to consume heroin and cocaine, the three propose that she go up to an apartment in via Oberdan, owned by the 22-year-old’s family. Once inside, the group expresses their desire to have sex but the woman refuses and tries to escape. But she doesn’t succeed, because the three block her inside the house and at that point, after a scuffle, they rape her.

The kidnapping lasts almost an hour, then the 37-year-old sees a window as the only way to escape and from there she tries to call for help and probably escape: the three try to stop her and at that point she falls into the street, from the foreground, with the head facing downwards. It’s the very early hours of the morning. First the woman’s screams and then the sound of the fall attract the attention of some neighbors, who call for help. The 37-year-old, with various fractures all over her body, was urgently transported to the emergency room of the Maggiore hospital: the woman is still hospitalized but will recover, explains the force.

In the meantime, the Carabinieri also arrive in via Oberdan and go back to the 22-year-old’s apartment. They only find him, who had remained inside after the woman’s fall, because the two foreigners had moved away in the meantime. The investigations initially started as a failure to provide assistance but the Carabinieri managed to reconstruct the entire story thanks to the woman’s testimonies, the images from the video surveillance cameras and the analysis of the cell phones. But the contribution of the citizens was also “fundamental”, underlined in the press conference Lieutenant Guido Rosati, interim commander of the central Bologna company of the Carabinieri: not only for the timely call for help, but also because “they immediately made themselves available to tell what they had seen and heard”.

The three boys, based on the investigations coordinated by prosecutor Anna Sessa, were therefore accused of aggravated gang sexual violence and aggravated kidnapping. The custody orders, issued by both the ordinary and juvenile courts, were carried out yesterday. The 22-year-old, an unemployed man of Piedmontese origins, was tracked down in the province of Pesaro and Urbino. The 17-year-old was still in Bologna while the 18-year-old was stopped in the Milan area, in Sesto San Giovanni. All three have police records, mainly for crimes against the person. The two adults ended up in prison, the 17 year old in the juvenile penal institute. Based on the investigations carried out, the Carabinieri exclude that the three have acted on other occasions as happened last May 29th: “We have no reason to believe that what could have been repeated over time and happened to other people”, explains Rosati.