Police have arrested two Nigerian migrant women in the Italian city of Genoa after a newborn boy died as a result of an attempted home circumcision.

The mother and grandmother of the newborn attempted to circumcise him inside an apartment in the Quezzi area of Genoa and called police at around 4am after the procedure went wrong, Il Giornale reports.

Paramedics soon arrived on the scene only to find the baby had died and immediately called the police who took the women into custody. Investigators noted that neither relative had neither the required skills nor the appropriate medical equipment to carry out the surgery.

Police also said that they were looking into the women’s mobile phone records to see who they had been in recent contact with and if it bore any relation to the case.

The death is the second baby to die from a home-performed circumcision within a matter of weeks in Italy, with a five-month-old boy dying in Reggio Emilia on March 24th.

In that case, the father of the child, a Ghanian migrant, claimed that God had asked him to circumcise the small boy in a dream.

Following the death of his son, the man was interviewed by Italian media and he told them, “It’s a private affair, why should I pay the consequences?”

Nearly One in Three Crimes In Italy Committed By Foreigners https://t.co/vtTPg7twKk — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) August 25, 2018

“If someone believes that I have killed him, he is wrong. The question, in this case, is to ask God: I saw him in a dream and he asked me to do it,” he added.

The attempted surgery had been carried out by a well-known “holy man” within the local African community who is also being sought in connection with the death of another baby in November of last year.

Since before the height of the 2015 migrant crisis, Italy has seen a wave of mostly African migrants arrive on its shores, with cultural practices such as voodoo being used by members of the Nigerian mafia to force women into sexual slavery.

The resulting mass migration has also led to a surge in migrant crimes with the Italian Interior Ministry, headed by populist Matteo Salvini, releasing figures last August showing migrants to make up nearly one-third of all criminal suspects.