Pippa Bacca
Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo (9 December 1974 – 31 March 2008), known as Pippa Bacca, was an Italian feminist performance artist who, together with a fellow artist, was hitchhiking through the Middle East to promote world peace under the motto "marriage between different peoples and nations", symbolically wearing a wedding dress during her trek. She was raped and murder by a Turkish man who picked her up while she was hitchhiking. Her body was found on 11 April 2008 in some shrubs near a Turkish village, the suspect led the police to the site where her naked body was dumped.
Death
Bacca was separated from her friend while traveling in Turkey. On 31 March 2008, Pippa Bacca disappeared. Her naked, strangled and decomposing body was found on 11 April 2008. The man who led the police to her body was detained and arrested, after reportedly confessing to raping and strangling Bacca on 31 March after taking her in his Jeep from a gas station. DNA testing suggested that Bacca was raped by multiple people.
A commentary in Today's Zaman, while expressing sadness for the woman's death, criticised the supposed obsequiousness of Turkish politicians to "foreigners" in the Bacca case, writing: "Let's face it, if Pippa were a Turk, some people would feel free to say that a hitchhiking woman deserves to be raped."
Her sister Rosalia Pasqualino said, she thought that in the world there were more positive than negative people, and that it was right to be trusting:
- "Trust is a very human factor, and she believed that to understand people, you had to get to know them."
