A truck driver lets a group of migrant women out of his trailer in Ventimiglia, on the border between Italy and France

Italian police are investigating a truck driver on Tuesday who forced a group of migrant women who were on top of the vehicle’s trailer to get out of his truck by whipping them in Ventimiglia, near the French border.

The scene was recorded in a video that has already gone viral on social networks and has shocked the public due to the cruelty of the images, which have also been reported today by practically all local media. In them, the driver is seen holding the steel end of the loading strap while he pulls the migrants out of the truck and then hitting them with what appears to be an improvised whip.

According to local media, the women of Eritrean nationality had been welcomed the night before at a “usual reception site” by the Caritas organization in Vettimiglia and returned there after the events to report what had happened. “They are images that affect, they hurt,” said Serena Regazzoni, head of the Caritas immigration sector in the region, who denounced that “the lack of a reception camp remains an unfillable void.”

Political condemnation

Political parties also criticised the photographs of the truck driver, who is already being investigated by the police.

Laura Boldrini, deputy of the Democratic Party (PD) and president of the Chamber’s permanent committee on human rights in the world, called it “a cruelty and dehumanization towards migrants.” For Boldrini, this is the “poisonous fruit” of a hypocrisy that “represents migrants as a public enemy”, but “closes one or both eyes” when they are exploited because then “the enemy is convenient and functional for productivity.”

“Every year thousands of people try to cross this border to seek asylum in France, many of them young women who could be our daughters and they are treated like the girls in that video,” said a senator for the Italia Viva party, Raffaella Paita.