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| - Italian police have arrested four suspects after a young man of Cape Verdian descent was beaten to death near Rome at the weekend, in a case which hit the headlines on Monday. Willy Monteiro Duarte, 21, was assaulted after he apparently came to the rescue of a school friend during an altercation on Sunday, Italian newspaper reports said. As Duarte and his friends were walking home in Collefero, a small town about 50 kilometres (30 miles) east of Rome, a car pulled up and four men jumped out, witnesses told the Il Messagero newspaper. His friends were able to flee but when they later returned to the scene, they found Duarte dying in a pool of blood. Police arrested four suspects at a nearby pub "with blood still on their hands", Il Messagero said. The suspects are said to be two brothers who are specialised in mixed martial-arts combat and two associates. Police said they have opened a homicide case, but that they were not investigating a racial motive for the attack on Duarte, whose parents are immigrants from the Cape Verde islands. Duarte's photo appeared on the front pages of Italy's major newspapers on Monday, with one saying: "Ciao Willy, killed for his generosity." Collefero on Monday declared a day of mourning as did the nearby town of Paliano, where Duarte -- a popular trainee chef -- lived. Duarte "was a great guy who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time", Paliano's mayor Dominico Alfieri said on Facebook. Although police were not treating the latest incident as a racial assault, such attacks have been on the rise in Italy, an independent monitor warned last year. The Rome-based Lunaria organisation said the increase was linked to the Italy's "hostile political atmosphere". Last month, a 25-year-old Senegalese man was beaten up on a beach in Tuscany by two Albanians in an apparent racist attack, the ANSA news agency said. cm-jhe/txw
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