PADUA - A former Carabiniere police officer convicted of raping five foreign couch-surfing girls from the United States, Canada, Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany in his B&B has been sentenced to nine years and eight months imprisonment by the Venice appeal court (Corte di Cassazione), brought down from an original 12 years and eight months, according to judicial sources.

  The convicted man is Dino Maglio, originally from Salento but served in the Carabinieri in Teolo (though he hasn't served since before 2015), in the province of Padua. He was charged with raping five girls and drugging nine. He had used his B&B as a front to attract young girls to his home on couch-surfing sites, usually foreigners visiting Italy, before abusing them.

  He was also accused of attempted bribery because he had tried to abuse his role as a Carabinieri to induce three of the victims to remain silent.

  According to the prosecution, he had found the girls online, on the website couchsurfing, on which he advertised the B&B he managed in the Padua’s Arcella neighbourhood.

  Maglio had awaited the result of his appeal under house arrest but will now be transferred to Santa Maria Capua Vetere prison.

  He has also had several other convictions, dug up during the investigations into his latest crimes. In 2015, he was convicted to six years and six months for the rape of an Australian high school student.

  A major force behind the investigations into Maglio was the Investigative Reporting Project Italy (IRPI), an association of investigative journalist who in 2014 searched the internet to find the stories of girls who had been abused in B&Bs in Italy.

  The journalists collected a dossier that was then dealt with by the Prosecutor Giorgio Falcone. Falcone tracked down several girls in Poland, Canada, Portugal, USA, Czech Republic and Germany, but only five of them remembered the violence they had suffered. The others could only recall the wine (spiked, though they didn’t know at the time) offered by Maglio.

  During the trial in Padua, Maglio told the court, “I am not a monster. The girls influenced each other through a chat. One even got paid by an American television show to give an interview. The truth is that they got drunk alone. They also made a cartoon about me.” 

  In the appeal court, he said “I apologise for what I did, I was in a difficult period because I had just been left by my girlfriend,” - a show of remorse that might have helped him but three years off his sentence.

ol