Police on Monday arrested eight Croatian gypsies on charges of forcing children to commit hundreds of burglaries in northern Italy, adding fuel to an ongoing furore over a government plan to fingerprint all children in the country's gypsy camps.
Seven adults and one minor were arrested in Liguria and Veneto following a six-month probe during which investigators linked the gypsies to burglaries in the regions of Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Emilia Romagna, Trentino-Alto Adige and Lombardy.
The Venice Juvenile Court ordered six children to be taken into state care as a result of the investigation.
According to police, the gypsies travelled across the country setting up temporary camps near inhabited centres, from which they would force their children under threats of violence to go out and burgle houses.
If the children were caught, they refused to identify themselves or their parents and would eventually flee back to the camps, investigators say.
Police cracked the burglary ring by confiscating the children's mobile phones, which their parents used to send them orders.
Verona Police Chief Vincenzo Stingone said investigators had ''brought to light an unsettling and worrying phenomenon''.
''What we discovered was a criminal organisation on a vast scale that did damage not only to the citizens across northern Italy with hundreds of burglaries, but also to dozens of children, trained in lawlessness and violence from early childhood, quite the opposite of what they need at that age,'' Stingone said.
Government politicians seized on the arrests to back up Interior Minister Roberto Maroni's plan to fingerprint all gypsies living in Italy, including children, during a census of camps scheduled to begin over the next few months.
The proposal has come under heavy fire from opposition politicians, children's rights organisations, Catholic immigration foundation Migrantes and international bodies including the European Union and the Council of Europe for discriminating against an ethnic minority.
''The operation shows that the punctual identification of children under the age of 14 is necessary,'' said Interior Undersecretary Alfredo Mantovano.
''The objective is not to introduce ethnic discrimination but to defend the rights of people who live in Italy and at the same time safeguard those minors who are coerced, sometimes with threats of sexual violence, into committing serious crimes,'' he added.
Osvaldo Napoli of the centre-right People of Freedom party said opposition politicians should stop shedding ''crocodile tears'' over the fingerprint plan.
''Maybe the left dreams of an Italy populated by lots of Oliver Twists exploited by the Fagin on duty,'' he said.
''But we are not in the Victorian England of Dickens and children can't wander abandoned through the streets of our cities''.
Under Maroni's proposal, fingerprints will be taken during a census of all gypsy camps in a bid to establish who is in the country legally and who is not.
Gypsies found without the correct paperwork will be expelled after three months.
The government eventually plans to dismantle all illegal camps as well as authorised camps that do not have adequate facilities.
According to the latest interior ministry figures, there are 152,000 gypsies, or Roma, living in Italy, around 37% of whom have Italian citizenship.
The vast majority of gypsies living in Italy are of Romanian origin, with a small percentage coming from the Balkans.
