ROME — A leader of Italy's right-wing government seized Feb. 4 on the alleged rape of a 13-year-old girl by Egyptian nationals in Catania to advocate with renewed energy for an immigration crackdown and harsher punishments for sex offenders. 

 "Do not come to me talking about 'tolerance' or 'mistakes,' deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini wrote in a statement Sunday. "There can be no clemency in the face of horrors like these."

 Catania police said that seven young men began harassing the alleged victim as she walked with her boyfriend through Villa Bellini, Catania's largest public park, last week. The group allegedly forced the couple into the park's public restroom, where two of the boys assaulted the girl as the others restrained her boyfriend. The couple broke free after a half-hour struggle, judicial sources said. 

 The next day Catania prosecutors charged seven suspects, all between 15 and 19 years old, with group sexual assault. The victim identified three of the suspects, and her boyfriend the other four. Two have confessed to and cooperated with investigators, Catania law enforcement said in a press conference.  

 Prosecutors said each of the seven alleged perpetrators crossed illegally from Egypt to Sicily by barge between November 2021 and March 2023, during one of the largest waves of migration from North Africa to Sicily on record. They were protected from deportation by the legge Zampa: a measure passed by former prime minister Paolo Gentiloni's government in 2017 which guarantees unaccompanied foreign minors' right to stay on Italian soil until they are of age, and clears them a path  — conditional on good behavior — to Italian residence in adulthood. 

 The suspects lived together in a Catania shelter designated for youth protected by the Zampa law. At the shelter they received Italian lessons, trade training, apprenticeships and, ultimately, jobs mainly in the catering, construction, and tourism industries, staff members said. The two alleged perpetrators who cooperated with law enforcement were both awaiting visas which would have allowed them to stay longterm in the country.

 The accusations against them show, said Lega Sicilia secretary Antonio Carrà, that what Lega has “always said on the issue of immigration was not demagoguery.” The "national policy pursued over the past decades by the left on immigration, security and justice has failed," he said. "The State must be strong in controlling the borders."

 This is the latest in a recent string of gang rapes to make headlines in Italy. Last July in Palermo, seven men filmed themselves raping a 19-year-old woman. In late August, the case of nine boys who repeatedly raped 10- and 12-year-old cousins in Caivano, a city northeast of Naples, prompted national outrage. 

 Prime minister Giorgia Meloni has stuck to a law-and-order message when addressing the rapes. She promised in a September visit to Caivano to expand its police force and to spearhead a crackdown on “criminality, illegality, drugs.” In a planned visit to Catania last weekend, Meloni assured the victim's family that “the State is here, and will ensure that justice will be served.”

 Salvini responded to news of the Catania attack with a less measured tone, and a return to a familiar playbook. “There is only one cure” for the seven alleged rapists, he wrote in his Sunday statement: “Chemical castration.”

 His Lega Nord in September introduced a Senate bill which would force all repeat sex offenders or offenders with child victims to undergo chemical castration, a hormone therpay which blocks testosterone production. "A prison sentence is not enough," Salvini said. In 2018 and again in 2019, Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia proposed ruling the procedure a condition for parole for convicted pedophiles and recidivist rapists. 

 FdI's proposals, and Lega's bill, have so far gained little traction. "Shrieking" about chemical castration "may yield some easy political consensus, but it solves absolutely nothing," said Partito Democratico deputy Laura Boldrini last summer. But Salvini wrote on Sunday that he counts on Lega's bill “to be voted on as soon as possible.”