Marchers protest racism in Italy after Africans are shot

ROME (AP) — Marchers protested racism Saturday in several Italian cities and warned against a revival of neo-fascist sentiment amid the campaign for Italy's March 4 national election.

In Macerata, a city in central Italy where a week ago a far-right gunman with neo-Nazi sympathies wounded six African migrants in a drive-by shooting, there were fears the march could trigger violence. Schools, shops and mass transit were shut down protectively for fear of clashes, but the march by several thousand people was peaceful.

Anti-fascist, anti-racism marchers also turned out in Milan, Turin, Rome and Palermo, Sicily, among other cities.

In Piacenza, a small city in northern Italy, some anti-fascism demonstrators hurled cobblestones at police and clashed with officers as they protested the opening of a local headquarters for a far-right political group, Sky TG24 TV and the ANSA news agency reported.

Italy's election campaign has been marked by rising tensions over the country's migrant population, which in the last few years has swelled by several hundred thousand people, many of them Africans. Most of them were rescued at sea from human traffickers' boats in the Mediterranean.

Surveys indicate that many Italians blame immigrants for violent crime. Leaders of a center-right campaign alliance, including former Premier Silvio Berlusconi and anti-migrant League leader Matteo Salvini, have pledged to quickly deport huge numbers of the migrants if they win power.

Salvini hammered away Saturday at the migrants-bring-violent-crime motif.

ANSA quoted him as telling a campaign rally in northern Italy that he couldn't wait for a March 4 election victory "to start expelling all the illegals one by one, to defend, above all, the women, the girls" who allegedly fear sexual assault by migrants.

In Macerata, the suspected gunman, Luca Traini, was arrested for the Feb. 3 shootings that targeted African migrants. The 28-year-old Italian was a former unsuccessful candidate for Salvini's party. He has told authorities he had been angered by the death of an 18-year-old Italian woman whose dismembered body was found in two suitcases.

Macerata prosecutors said Saturday that preliminary autopsy results indicated the woman, who had walked away from a drug rehabilitation center, had been likely murdered and not died from a drug overdose. They said four Nigerians, including a local drug dealer, are under investigation in her death.

Among Macerata's marchers on Saturday was Cecile Kyenge, a former Italian integration minister and a native of Africa. She said marching was a way to protest "the hate that is dividing our country."