An actor for 18 years having played the role of a teenage criminal from Naples in a film adapted from a novel by Roberto Saviano was injured in stabbings in the city in the south of Italy, reported on Monday the Italian media.

The Ukrainian Artem Tkachuk played the role of a gang member and dealer of the drugs in the film Piranha , adapted from the novel La paranza dei bambini journalist and writer famous for his investigations into the mafia of naples, the Camorra.

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Artem Tkachuk, 18, was attacked last week by members of what is known in Naples as the “baby-gangs”, gangs of very young offenders, at the time where he came home in the early morning of a night with a friend. The actor, faced with a fifteen young people, has been stabbed twice and his friend beaten up, but their days are not in danger.

The police considers, among other assumptions, that the young Ukrainian could be assaulted for his role in Piranha , which received a silver Bear this year at the Berlin film festival and must go out on 5 June in France.

To combat the phenomenon of “baby-gangs”, the League, the far-right party in power, supports a bill to lower from 14 to 12 years the age of criminal responsibility in Italy. According to the national Observatory on childhood and adolescence, about 6.5% of the young people of Naples belong to the “baby-gangs”.

Roberto Saviano, a writer committed against the mafia, has lived under armed protection since the publication of his international bestseller Gomorrah in 2006.