At the time we lacked the element to separate truth from lies'. Suspicion, too, fell on Mohammed M H when he went to a police station in the Spanish enclave of Melilla in Morocco, to report an incident on the bus. According to the police, he was drunk and died 'suddenly' in the station. A second autopsy commissioned by the Muslim's family found that the dead man had received several blows to his head hours before his death. In Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland and Italy, black people were killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and racists saw their very presence as a threat.
Popular racism seems most prevalent in Italy which saw four deaths at the hands of racists.
Movements have occurred sporadically throughout Italy in the course of 1996 to keep immigrants and Roma out of city-centres, sometimes fomented by the Northern League and the National Alliance, sometimes the result of grassroots mobilisations and sometimes directed by the Mafia, particularly in the South where the Camorra launched a vicious campaign to evict immigrants by threatening landlords with violence. Ten immigrants, picked at random, were shot, mostly through the legs, during a Mafia campaign in the Caserta area during April. A strong factor in this combination of racisms was the passing of the Dini decree by the then centre-right government at the end of 1995. Within weeks of the decree, which introduced tough sanctions for employers of illegal labour while offering an amnesty to workers whose employers would agree to pay social insurance contributions, immigrant workers were being sacked. His employer had demanded money from the Ghanaian to make it worth his while to legalise him.