ROME - Twelve members of the neo-nazi organisation Ordine Ario Romano, including ‘Miss Hitler 2019,’ have been accused of criminal association and incitement to hatred based on ethnic and religious discrimination and issued with precautionary measures, including the obligation to present themselves to judicial authorities, according to police sources.

  Among the 12 under investigation is also a Carabiniere in service in Rome.

  The group had used social media, mostly VK (a Russian social media site) and WhatsApp, to incite racial hatred, one post being titled “how to spot a Jew by his nose,” and were even using it to plan violent action. On the Ordine Ario Romano page on VK there were the beginnings of a plan to attack a NATO base in Italy using homemade bombs.

  According to the prosecutors, the group "are united by a single political and cultural conception consisting of supremacist sentiments and contempt.”

  The Ordine Ario Romano were spread round the whole of Italy. Of the 12 under investigation by the Carabinieri and Rome Prosecutor’s Office, ranging from 25 to 62 years old, six were from Lazio, three from Sardinia, one from Calabria, one from Abruzzo and one from Lombardy.

  The group is led by Mario Marras, 40, and Francesca Rizzi, who in 2019 was crowned Miss Hitler in a competition run on VK, which every year crowns “the best of the Aryan race.”

  In August she had participated in a neo-Nazi rally in Lisbon organised by the Portuguese far-right movement Nova Ordem Social, a conference that brought together 65 representatives of the European extreme right, including the Germans of Die Rechte, the French of the Parti Nationaliste Francais and the Italians of Autonomia Nazionale, a small movement led by Rizzi.

  In 2019 she had been investigated by the Carabinieri and had all her principal social media accounts disactivated, but despite this, she has managed to continue her neo-nazi activities.

  In order to join the order, according to one of the online chats on record, you have to submit your real name and a photo of yourself.

  The prosecutors have underlined how the innumerable posts on the page were not limited to “pursuing a purely mental and ideological conditioning of internet users, but are clearly aimed at instilling concrete, violent and provocative action.” They emphasised that there is a concrete risk that online incitement of racial hatred can quickly switch to violent behaviour towards racial and ethnic minorities.

  Several members of the group had also been in contact, on VK, with Marco Gervasoni, the Professor at the University of Molise who was investigated recently by the Carabinieri for threats he made against Italian President Sergio Mattarella. 

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