Italy:It was morning on the Rome metro. Carriages were crowded, as per usual, so no one paid a lot of attention when three women starting shouting at one another.
Vanessa Russo (22), a trainee nurse, may have been suspicious of the two Romanian women who kept bumping into her. People like Vanessa who use the metro daily in Rome tend to be wary.
For reasons unknown, the shouting match between Vanessa and the two Romanians did not end there. As Vanessa got off the train at the central station, one of the women, Doina Matei - aged 22 like Vanessa - launched herself at Vanessa, brandishing an umbrella. What Doina intended to achieve with the umbrella is a matter of conjecture.
What she did achieve was horribly fatal, with the tip of the umbrella crashing into one of Vanessa's eyes, provoking horrendous internal bleeding from which Vanessa subsequently died.
As passersby rushed to help, the two Romanians made themselves scarce. CCTV camera footage, however, was to lead to the almost-immediate arrest of Doina, since video clips and stills taken from the video were subsequently made available by police investigators to all the national media.
The faces of the two Romanians soon became very well-known, so much so that an elderly woman living in the small town of Tolentino, in the province of Macerata in the northeastern Marche region, phoned the local police to say she was sure she recognised them as she looked out her window at two women sitting on a bench.
As a matter of routine, the police checked out the elderly woman's call. She turned out to be absolutely right and Doina and "I C B" were arrested in Tolentino last Sunday, as they sat reading accounts of the "metro death of Vanessa". Both women are currently in custody.
Coming in a week when Romanian Giani Bedreaga (34) was arrested on charges that he had killed an elderly couple in Mendicino, close to Cosenza, in southern Italy, the Vanessa killing has inevitably prompted an ugly anti-immigrant mood.
This particularly affects the Romanian community, considered by some to be especially dangerous because, of course, as EU citizens now, they no longer need a residency permit.
"For 10 years now, these eastern Europeans, whom we know to be violent drunkards, killers and people involved in prostitution and the abuse of minors, as well as responsible for various road deaths, for 10 years they have been committing crimes in our country," Northern League senator Piergiorgio Stiffoni said this week.
It matters little that police records show that among foreigners living in Italy, Moroccans and Albanians are responsible for more crime than Romanians. It may matter little, too, that the majority of Italy's three million immigrants make a significant contribution (albeit not always legally registered) to agriculture, the building industry, home help services and other industries. Not for nothing, 61 per cent of immigrants live in the more industrialised northeast and northwest of Italy, with only 12 per cent of them based in the islands of Sicily and Sardinia.
The ugly mood was all too tangible at Vanessa's funeral this week in the Rome suburb of Fidene, with a priest's call for "forgiveness" meeting with a resounding howl of "never" from Vanessa's mother, Rita, and from other mourners gathered.
A little distance from where Vanessa's funeral was held, runs the busy Salaria, one of the main roads in and out of the capital.
Despite the fact that it passes through a busy office area (Sky Italia TV has its headquarters on the Salaria), the road is plagued, at any time of day, with lines of semi-naked (often east European) prostitutes desperate for business. The point about Doina, Vanessa's killer, is that she and her friends were two such prostitutes, already recorded on police files.