MILAN -- The mayor of this Lombard city has asked for Italian soldiers to be deployed in the business capital to curb violent street crime, particularly after the shooting of a 37-year-old man in the suburbs, government sources said Tuesday.

 “Little security in the suburbs? I have asked soldiers to be sent to the city,” in particular to those zones “like via Padova,” where the safety of the citizens is “most at risk,” said the mayor of Milan, Giuseppe Sala, alongside the visit of the President of the Chamber of Deputies Laura Boldrini, who arrived Monday and visited people living in the suburbs of the city, Il Fatto Quotidiano writes.

 “Now that the Jubilee in Rome has finished, I hope, and it is on this front that I wish to work, that parts of the military working over there will now come here.” The secretary’s office then specified that the request for the presence of the army concerns "the whole Milanese periphery, not just via Padova.”

 In response to the mayor’s declarations, Lega Nord politician Matteo Salvini said “Sala wants the army in Milan? What… when we did that the Democratic Party sent them away and now they are calling it back. Sala and Renzi are ridiculous. They should be ashamed, they have messed around with the Milanese citizens and taken away the security from the city.”

 It was after the shooting of a Domenican man Antonio Rafael Ramirez, aged 37, in via Padova in the early evening, who was left severly wounded, that the security councillor Carmela Rozza announced that they had requested the presence of the army now working in Rome.

 “None of us have ever denied” that in the suburbs of the city “there is a security problem. Obviously, we need more people. We will act from Loreto upwards because the problem of security is more intense there than in other places,” Rozza said.

 nkd