Modena (Italy) (AFP) – Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Sunday visited people wounded by a driver with a history of mental health problems who ran over several pedestrians in a city centre in northern Italy.
Issued on: 17/05/2026 - 18:30
3 min Reading time
The driver, a 31-year-old Italian man of Moroccan heritage, hit several people in central Modena before crashing into a shop window, colliding head-on with a woman."For the moment, what is become most clear, is that this personal situation is of a psychiatric nature," Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said Sunday, after a meeting with officials at Modena city hall."I'm not trying to minimise it," he added. "There are sometimes situations in which the reasons overlap, that someone acts for terrorism or for outer reasons. Let the investigators do their work."The city should be reassured from this point of view, in the sense that this is a dramatic, tragic, isolated episode," he said.He joined other politicians who have praised the reactions of citizens who capture the driver after he tried to flee the scene.Some far-right politicians seized on the incident as a justification for further tightening controls on immigration, even though the alleged perpetrator is an Italian citizen.But the city's centre-left mayor Massimo Mezzetti pointed out that two Egyptian nationals had helped stop the knife-wielding driver when he tried to run off.'Psychological disturbance'Eight people were wounded in Saturday's incident in Modena, four of them seriously, including a woman who had to have both legs amputated, officials said.Meloni cancelled a planned visit to Cyprus to go to Modena, a government source said.The far-right leader travelled with President Sergio Mattarella to a hospital treating the wounded.Security camera footage broadcast by Italian media showed a car being driven at high speed into a city centre street packed with pedestrians and cyclists.
