An Italian woman says she narrowly escaped being sexually assaulted by a group of around 25 young men as she was walking one evening in Florence. Luckily, a Bangladeshi flower-seller was nearby to avert the attack.

The 25-year-old was walking alone on the street at 11:30pm local time, when a group of some two dozen men approached her, the woman wrote on her Facebook page. The men started to joke and asked for a selfie. But the situation apparently got worse after they offered her “a gang bang” and said she would have “a good night with them.”

After the woman tried to walk away, some of the males spat at her and grabbed her by the arm.“I started crying like a little girl, I was desperate," she told Corriere Della Sera, adding that passers-by didn’t lift a finger to intervene. However, a Bangladeshi man named Hossein Alamgir spotted the altercation at Piazza della Repubblica, where he usually sells flowers. Speaking to Direttanews, Hossain, who has lived in Italy since 2005, said he did not notice anything suspicious at first when he saw the woman and the company “of drunken youngsters,” since they were joking and laughing.

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However, after seeing the young woman’s reaction and her attempts to get away from the men, he said he didn’t hesitate to tell the group to leave the woman alone, threatening to call the police and dragging her away.

"I was desperate, choking," the woman said, adding that her rescuer calmed her as if she were his daughter, giving her a handkerchief and snacks. “This is a face I'll never forget,” the woman wrote on her Facebook page after uploading a picture of the rose-seller. She is now mulling whether to file a complaint against the group of men, according to the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera.