On May 29, 2026, Italian prosecutors formally requested a life sentence for Cinzia Dal Pino, a 65-year-old businesswoman from Viareggio who ran over and killed Said Malkoun with her SUV after he stole her bag.
Malkoun, 47, whose nationality authorities could not confirm because he had given false information during previous arrests, had no fixed address and no valid residence permit, and supported himself through theft.
Prosecutor Sara Polino charged Dal Pino with aggravated voluntary homicide, citing cruelty, futile motives, use of a dangerous instrument, and diminished defense of the victim, who was struck from behind on foot.
Dal Pino told the court she acted “only to stop him because he had stolen my bag,” adding that she believed he was armed with a knife — a weapon investigators say was never found.
The incident comes just two weeks after the reverse occurred: a vehicular attack on Italians by a North African, in which no life sentence was sought, underscoring how the legal system protects illegal aliens and Islamists at the expense of ordinary Italian citizens.
On May 16, Salim El Koudri, a 31-year-old Italian citizen of Moroccan origin, drove his car at high speed into pedestrians in Modena, injuring eight, four critically, including two women who lost their legs. He then exited the vehicle and stabbed a bystander before being subdued by civilians.
These two cases unfolded against a wider pattern of violent crime committed by migrants and illegal aliens in Italy.
On May 19, a 32-year-old woman was held captive for three days in an abandoned building in Rome’s Tor Cervara district, gang-raped under threats of death while being drugged, and escaped on the third day. Five men, Gambian, Nigerian, and Malian nationals aged 29 to 43, were arrested on charges of aggravated gang rape.
In April, seven suspects of African and Asian origin were charged with gang-raping a 23-year-old woman in Cesena after filming the assault on their phones. Italian media initially described the suspects as Italian and disclosed their origins only in follow-up reporting.
Also in May, a North African man forced his way into a home in Livorno and sexually assaulted a 56-year-old woman before a neighbor intervened.
The statistical backdrop to these cases is documented in Italian Interior Ministry data. Foreigners, who comprise approximately 9 percent of Italy’s population, account for 44 percent of sexual crimes.
Since 2018, 11,141 women have been raped by foreign nationals. As of January 2026, more than 30,000 foreign nationals who had received custodial sentences were serving their time outside prison.
In addition to crime committed by migrants in Italy, the country is now seeing a rise in terrorism-linked activity.
On May 20, a 15-year-old Tunisian immigrant was placed in juvenile detention in Florence on terrorism charges after resuming contact with ISIS-affiliated accounts just days after a court had released him from a prior order for the same offense. Police reported that he had declared himself “ready to act” and was seeking weapons.
On May 22, an Italian court sentenced a Tunisian man to six years in prison for membership in an ISIS-linked cell in Cosenza. Investigators found that the cell also managed illegal immigration flows from Tunisia to Italy using false documents.
The attack carried out by Salim El Koudri in Modena, in which he drove his car into pedestrians before exiting the vehicle and stabbing a bystander, follows a blueprint disseminated through Islamic-extremist publications for exporting jihad to the West.
The sequence, vehicle ramming followed by a knife attack, matches the methodology prescribed in Rumiyah, the Islamic State’s operational magazine, which, in its November 2016 “Just Terror Tactics” installment, instructed followers to drive vehicles into crowds before switching to bladed weapons.
The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) documented this same two-phase method in the 2017 London Bridge and Stockholm attacks.
Counterterrorism analyst Giovanni Giacalone of the David Institute for Security Policy stated that El Koudri’s method “is the classic Islamic State ‘lone wolf’ approach, already used in numerous attacks in Europe and the United States by ISIS supporters.”
Italian authorities classified the attack as a mental-health incident within 36 hours, despite investigators subsequently finding terrorist videos on El Koudri’s phone, internet searches related to vehicular attacks, and anti-Christian emails he had sent to the University of Modena in 2021 containing the words, “You Christian bastards, you and your Jesus Christ on the cross, I’ll burn him.”
A witness testified that she overheard El Koudri the night before the attack telling an accomplice he would be paid “more than 40,000 euros” to execute “a beautiful show, which many will see.”
Videos of the attack subsequently circulated on jihadist channels with Arabic commentary praising El Koudri as a “monotheist” acting in the “heartland of the Crusaders.”
The Modena attack follows the foundational model of modern jihadist terrorism, defined by RAND Corporation analyst Brian Jenkins in 1974 as “terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.” That doctrine has since been superseded by ISIS and al-Qaeda’s deliberate pursuit of mass casualties in public spaces, ensuring the violence is witnessed, filmed, and disseminated.
The circulation of attack footage on jihadist channels serves two purposes simultaneously: it creates fear among civilian populations by demonstrating that no public space is safe, and it functions as a recruitment tool, proving to potential fighters that lone individuals can strike Western societies without organizational support.
That both objectives depend on maximum visibility explains why jihadist organizations claim responsibility for attacks even when their operational role is indirect; the audience, not the body count, is the weapon.
One would believe that, in a rational world, the combination of crime and terrorism now plaguing the Italian population would be evidence of the dangers of EU open-border policies and would incentivize Italian lawmakers to secure the border and deport illegal aliens, as well as aliens convicted of crimes or linked to terrorist networks.
The problem is compounded by an asylum system that functions as a parallel entry mechanism, anyone reaching Italian soil can claim asylum and remain in the country indefinitely while their case is processed and appealed, often for years, even when the claim is ultimately rejected.
Unfortunately, Meloni faces constraints on two fronts. At the supranational level, the European Court of Justice has repeatedly struck down or curtailed her deportation and detention policies, with Italian courts referring cases upward to Luxembourg and binding Rome to rulings it cannot legislate around.
At the domestic level, the structure of the Italian parliamentary system, in which left-leaning parties can form coalitions to obstruct such measures, creates an additional layer of political resistance. The result is that even a prime minister with a popular mandate and a parliamentary majority finds her ability to remedy the problem severely limited by forces operating both above and beneath her government.
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