MILAN - A gunman with extreme right-wing sympathies shot and wounded six African immigrants on Saturday in a two-hour drive-by shooting spree, authorities said, terrorizing a small Italian city where a Nigerian man had been arrested days earlier in a teenager's gruesome killing.

Police photos showed the shooting suspect with a neo-Nazi tattoo prominently on his forehead as he sat in custody and an Italian flag tied around his neck as he was arrested in the central Italian city of Macerata. Authorities identified him as Luca Traini, a 28-year-old Italian with no previous record.

Traini had run for town council on the anti-migrant Northern League's list in a local election last year in Corridonia, the party confirmed, but its mayoral candidate lost the race. The news agency ANSA quoted friends of his as saying that Traini had previously been affiliated with Italian extremist parties like the neo-fascist Forza Nuova and CasaPound.

The shooting spree came days after the slaying of 18-year-old Pamela Mastropietro and amid a heated electoral campaign in Italy where anti-foreigner sentiment has become a key theme. Italy has struggled with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants in the last few years coming across the Mediterranean Sea in smugglers' boats.

After the attack, Premier Paolo Gentiloni warned in Rome that "the state will be particularly severe against whoever thinks of feeding the spiral of violence".

"We will stop this risk. We will stop it right away. We will stop it together," he said.

In Macerata, Interior Minister Marco Minniti said the gunman had been motivated "by racial hatred", and had "a background of right-wing extremism with clear references to fascism and Nazism".

"What happened appears to be a completely random armed retaliation raid," Minniti said, adding that evidence indicated that while the gunman had planned the attack, he had acted alone.

Authorities said the six wounded - five men and one woman - appeared to be random targets in various parts of the city of 43,000 in Italy's central Marche region. Italian news reports indicated that the gunman's trajectory included the area where the Italian murder victim was found and where the prime suspect in her slaying lived.

The identities and nationalities of the shooting victims remained unknown. Hospital officials said late on Saturday that one had been treated and released, while the others had either undergone surgery or were facing operations for their injuries. One of them remained in intensive care.

Mastropietro's dismembered remains were found on Wednesday in two suitcases two days after she walked away from a drug rehab community.

A judge on Saturday confirmed the arrest of the main suspect, identified as 29-year-old Innocent Oseghale.

Italy is heading into a general election on March 4 and the head of the rebranded League party, Matteo Salvini, is pledging to deport 150,000 migrants in his first year in office if his party wins control of parliament and he is named premier.

Associated Press