Singer scarred in latest attack by former lover
ITALY: A former Miss Italy contestant may lose her sight after acid was thrown in her face, allegedly by a jealous ex-boyfriend, in the latest in a series of brutal attacks on Italian women by spurned partners.
Gessica Notaro, 28, who competed in the pageant in 2007 before becoming a singer and sea lion trainer, was ambushed outside her house in the northern city of Rimini on Wednesday. A man threw hydrochloric acid in her face and fled.
She was taken to a burns unit in the nearby town of Cesena, where doctors described her wounds as ‘‘serious and deep’’. They said it would be several days before they knew whether she would see again.
Notaro identified the attacker as her former boyfriend, Jorge Edson Tavares, 29, originally from the Cape Verde islands, who had allegedly stalked her relentlessly after she ended their two-year relationship in August.
After she reported his habit of waiting outside her house and pestering her with phone calls, a magistrate recommended that Tavares be arrested, only for a judge to overrule the decision.
Tavares has been arrested but has denied involvement in the attack.
A friend of Notaro said: ‘‘She was always smiling, always optimistic. Her mother is destroyed by this.’’
In a separate assault on Monday in Messina, Sicily, a man drenched Ylenia Grazia Bonavera, 22, with petrol when she answered her front door and set her alight, causing severe injuries.
Police arrested her 25-year-old boyfriend, who was said to be extremely jealous of her, after he was filmed by CCTV at a local garage before the attack filling a bottle with petrol. Bonavera has denied his involvement, claiming that ‘‘he loved me to death’’.
Of the 120 women murdered in Italy last year, about 110 were killed by jealous men - nearly one every three days.
Last year a lawyer was jailed for 20 years after paying two men to throw acid in the face of Lucia Anniballi, who had left him. She has undergone 17 operations to reconstruct her face. She was the subject of an Italian film that activists hope will raise awareness of the phenomenon and encourage judges to take complaints from stalked women seriously.
Speaking after the latest acid attack, Anniballi said she was concerned that her biopic might be encouraging copycats.
Paola Lattes, the vice-president of an Italian helpline for stalked women, said: ‘‘Throwing acid in a woman’s face ... was popular in Sicily at the time of the Second World War, but is now making a comeback.’’- The Times