Beaten and whipped on the back and legs for his "pranks". The investigation by the Catania Prosecutor's Office led to the arrest of the mother of the five-year-old boy and an aunt. The investigating judge issued a precautionary custody order for the two women, aged 28 and 23 respectively, both Nigerian, a provision carried out by the Flying Squad.
The investigations were started after the complaint from the director of the school attended by the child which reported "obvious whippings on the back and legs", " incontrovertible signs of repeated violence".
"The non-EU citizens arrested would be the authors of very serious illicit conduct perpetrated against a minor of just 5 years of age", we read in a note.
The child, taken to the pediatric emergency room of the Garibaldi-Nesima hospital in Catania, received the appropriate treatment, with a prognosis of 15 days, the doctors found the «presence of numerous deep “U”-shaped abrasions, from plausible whippings."
From the Police investigations, reconstructs the Prosecutor's Office, it "emerged that an alarming picture from which it could be deduced that the signs of violence imprinted on the child's body would have been inflicted by the twenty-three-year-old suspect with electric cables and this following banal whims and not better specify pranks attributed to the minor". The abuse of the "aunt", who in reality had no family ties with the child, would also have occurred in the presence of the mother who "did no effort to avoid it, to prevent it or to report it to the relevant institutional bodies in order to avoid any possible recurrence" .
The little victim allegedly said that he «was hit by his aunt (…) several times using a black cable (…) for charging the electric bicycle owned by his mother (…) telling several times that these signs were caused by his aunt in the face of disobedience ».
(Unioneonline/ss)