ROME: Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi on Monday defended the expulsions of Romanians considered dangerous following a fatal assault last week, but warned against “criminalising” the whole community.

“The emergency expulsion decree for EU citizens who pose a public and social danger was a necessary action but also a fair one,” Prodi wrote in an open letter published in the Roman daily Il Messaggero.

Some three dozen Romanians have been expelled, and hundreds more face expulsion under the emergency decree issued after the fatal attack on an Italian woman implicating a Romanian youth from a shantytown on the outskirts of Rome.

Politicians on the far left have decried the expulsions, while right-wing figures have called for massive, in some cases wholesale, deportations.

With emotions running high in the wake of the killing — apparently a robbery gone tragically wrong — Alessandra Mussolini, the dictator’s granddaughter, called for the expulsion of all Romanians from Italy.

“In the face of such beastliness, we cannot respond with lightweight initiatives. We should immediately ask the Romanian ambassador to leave our country and consider every Romanian an undesirable citizen,” she said.

Some Romanians are leaving of their own accord fearing xenophobic reprisals.

Masked Italians beat up three Romanians on Friday in an incident widely linked to the fatal assault on Giovanna Reggiani, the wife of a high-ranking naval officer, three days earlier.

Prodi, who is to meet here with his Romanian counterpart Calin Tariceanu later this week, wrote in Il Messagero: “I have the duty to respond to the demands of citizens who want more security. But we cannot allow ourselves to criminalise an entire people because of wrongs committed by an individual or a minority.”

“The risk of xenophobic excess must be averted. Xenophobia and intolerance are not part of our values and our culture.” Romania’s foreign ministry on Saturday “strongly condemned” Friday’s apparent reprisal attack.

Romanians are Italy’s largest immigrant community, numbering some 342,000 according to the ISTAT statistical institute and more than half a million according to the Catholic organisation Caritas.

Many live in squalor. Rome alone counts 66 shantytowns populated mainly by Romanians.

Centrist politician Marco Di Stefano of the UDEUR party, a member of Prodi’s wide-ranging coalition, accused the Italian right of politicising the situation.

“The aggression against the three Romanians in Rome is to be condemned with no ands, ifs or buts,” he told reporters, adding: “The criminalisation by the right of an entire people is unacceptable.” Di Stefano, UDEUR’s commissioner for the province of Rome, said it is “equally clear that the problem of homeless Romanians must be addressed with concrete measures to make Rome safer.”

Prodi, while admitting that immigration could be better controlled, said: “Ending immigration into our country is not possible because it is impossible to ignore the demographics” of Italy’s ageing population.

“We forget that without immigrants Italy would stop functioning. I continue to believe that Romania’s entry into the EU (in January) was a positive thing, as the work of thousands of honest Romanians in Italy shows every day.” Rome marked a day of mourning on Saturday when Reggiania was buried, with both Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni and Interior Minister Giulio Amato among the hundreds of mourners attending.

The crisis prompted a plea on Sunday from Pope Benedict XVI for “spirit of high moral civility” between immigrants and native-born Italians.—AFP