On Saturday morning, passengers on a bus witnessed the horror in first person. While traveling through the streets of Stroncone, an Italian town in the city of Terni in the Umbria region, a 42-year-old man attacked his wife with a hammerleaving her seriously injured, and then fled.
According to the Italian newspaper The Messengerthe aggressor was identified as Mohamed El Messaoudia worker in the engineering sector, who at the time of the attack had an electronic bracelet due to previous complaints of gender violence and a 500-meter restriction order that he failed to comply with when boarding the means of transport.
The victim, a 43-year-old woman, had finished her workday as a caregiver at the home of a family in the area, and boarded the bus to return home, as she did every day.
Suddenly, she was savagely attacked by her ex-partner in front of everyone present, and since then she has remained hospitalized at the Santa María Hospital in Terni in serious condition.
Attempted femicide in a group in Italy: «He left the hammer with the label on, he bought it to kill her»
In a press conference held at the Carabinieri provincial police station on Via Radice, Terni prosecutor Antonio Laronga reconstructed the chronology of the attack, which took place on bus line 622, which connects Terni with Stroncone.
«The victim, identified as Fathia El Afghanihad a romantic relationship with the attacker since October 2023, and there was a restraining order in force since April 4, which until May 9, the day of the attack, was not breached,» said the prosecutor.
«The man approached her in a matter of minutes while the bus was moving and the poor woman I had no way to escape«Largona said.
«He suffered at least eight blows with a newly purchased hammer, since the weapon was found at the crime scene with the price tag still on the handle,» he said.
He confirmed that she is hospitalized with a reserved prognosis with a skull fracture with loss of brain tissue. «He has very serious injuries, with fractures in all bones of the skull: the frontal, the right parietal, the left parietal, the right maxilla, the mandible and the right zygomatic arch; «The situation is so serious that medical personnel warn that there is a high risk of death,» he said.
The details of the attack were also explained by the young driver of the bus where the incident occurred. «The man got on the bus much earlier, waited for Fathia to get on and attacked her from behind, hitting her repeatedly, even after she had already fallen to the ground,» he revealed.
«The attacker he got back on the bus after getting off the first time to hurt her againtrying until the last moment to kill her,» the authorities stated.
Two days on the run and his stop for coffee
After committing the crime, the man left the gun he used on the bus, got off and took off his electronic anklet. Local authorities believe that he fled towards a forest near the scene of the aberrant events.
The investigation was launched immediately after the attack, coordinated by the Terni Prosecutor’s Office, which signed the arrest warrant. The Carabinieri organized searches in the area and in the rest of Italy, with a wide deployment of personnel and resources.
«The military deployment was extensive, with helicopters and specialized Carabinieri teams arriving from outside the region, but they held out for two days in the forest, presumably without food,» police said.
The man’s mugshot has since circulated and gone viral on Facebook. On Tuesday morning, two workers at a confectionery shop in Vascigliano, a village in the municipality of Stroncone, alerted the police about the presence of the man.
The suspect went to have breakfast in a bar in the industrial area of Stroncone. «He arrived, sat at a table, seemed very calm, had a cappuccino, two cakes and a sandwich,» said Maria, one of the bar employees.
«He was clean, with a good appearance, less beard than in the photo that circulated, and he had no damaged clothes,» he described. «He asked for a bus ticket, which we didn’t have, he paid correctly and left,» he said.
They arrested him shortly after he left the cafeteria, before he arrived at the same bus terminal where he committed the crime. He is currently detained and accused of attempted femicide aggravated by cruelty.
Italian media indicate that the man, originally from Morocco, had recently obtained a residence permit thanks to his marriage to the victim, and had begun to mistreat her incessantly and violently from the moment he obtained said document.
