bari Slightly reduced sentence on appeal for the 22-year-old accused of sexual violence on two very young French tourists, committed in an apartment in the center of Bari in the summer of 2022. At first instance the accused, Loris Attolini, was sentenced to 7 years and 8 months of imprisonment with an abbreviated trial, found guilty of double sexual violence aggravated by the minor age of one of the victims, kidnapping, injuries, robbery and resistance to a public official, with the recognition of equivalent generic mitigating circumstances. The defense renounced almost all the grounds of appeal and yesterday the Court, after a long deliberation, reduced the sentence to 7 years of imprisonment, confirming responsibility for all the charges. The reasons will be filed within 15 days.
The story dates back to 8 August 2022. The two friends, on a post-graduation holiday in Puglia, had met the 22-year-old that same evening. They had stopped to ask for information on the nearest tobacco shop and he would have offered to accompany them and then invite them to her house. There, in via Sagarriga Visconti, the abuse allegedly took place. A chat, a glass of wine, an “erotic game”. Then the brutal attack, as reconstructed by the Flying Squad police, coordinated by prosecutor Desirèe Digeronimo: raped in turns for sixty minutes, beaten, robbed.
After having threatened and stripped them, ripping off their clothes, to photograph them and shoot a video of the two naked girls, threatening to publish that material on social media if they did not cooperate, he allegedly “slammed one of the two against the front door, hitting her in the face”. with at least five elbows”, “throwing the two girls – we read in the indictment – into a state of prostration and terror regarding their fate, also because he locked the entrance door and blocked them in the house preventing them from going out, so as to induce them to give in to his requests.” What happened in the following sixty minutes, which the girls then told the police in detail, was a succession of violence, abuse and threats caused by a sudden “outburst” of the 21-year-old.
In fact, he repeatedly raped them in turns, for about an hour, with a “contemptuous attitude and completely indifferent to the pleas” of the two victims, the investigating judge wrote in the arrest warrant. The Prosecutor’s Office spoke of «violent and unscrupulous methods, which seem inspired by the well-known film “A Clockwork Orange”», while the two victims in tears begged Attolini to let them go. One of the two, in a moment of distraction, managed to telephone her father in France to ask for help. Even this would not have stopped the attacker, who would have continued with the violence. He would have let them go, keeping their cell phone as a “trophy”, only after receiving 90 euros in exchange for their freedom. And so, alone in the middle of the night, in tears and with torn clothes, the two girls were rescued and taken to hospital, receiving treatment and assistance, including psychological. Their statements were then crystallized in an evidentiary incident.
The two victims, assisted by the lawyers Andrea Di Comite and Gaia Martinelli (Polis), joined civil proceedings and had already been awarded compensation with a provisional amount of 10 thousand euros at first instance for the “psychological damage, linked to the serious trauma suffered by both suffered, sexual violence in a foreign country, and physical violence.”
Attolini, assisted by the lawyer Sabino Strambelli, was arrested a few hours later and remained in cell for a year, until August 2023. Since then he has been under house arrest with permission to go out two afternoons a week to attend a counseling center where he collaborates with the voluntary association that manages the structure.
