“I was afraid of being strangled, I couldn’t breathe,” Joly explained in a video posted Monday on La Stampa’s website. “I was just doing my job,” he said. “It could have happened to any curious citizen, and that’s what’s most frightening.”

Turin police on Sunday identified the two attackers as militants from the CasaPound group. They are accused of causing bodily harm and facilitating an organization that promotes “discrimination or ethnic, national, racial or religious hatred,” ANSA reported.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Sunday condemned the attack as “unacceptable” and expressed her solidarity with the journalist. “The government is paying maximum attention to it,” she said, according to La Repubblica.

Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani also condemned the attack in a message on X, saying there is “too much violence and intolerance in Italy against people who do not think like you.”

Opposition leaders called for CasaPound to be disbanded. “What are we waiting for to disband neo-fascist organizations, as the constitution says?” Elly Schlein, leader of the center-left Democratic Party, asked in a Facebook post.

Carlo Calenda, leader of the centrist Azione party, called CasaPound “a fascist organization in method and content, which for too long has been coddled, protected and justified by a section of the Italian right.”

“Alarm bells have already sounded several times about some anti-democratic tendencies in our country,” said Giuseppe Conte, president of the 5 Star Movement. “It is up to politicians and healthy forces to intervene and put an end to these insane upsurges of arrogance and violence.”

The attack on Joly was the second episode of apparently hate-motivated violence in Italy in recent days. A gay couple was beaten up by three men and a woman in Rome on Friday.