Caught in the act: The 'gipsy' child thieves who could teach Fagin a trick or two

Another man, laden with a backpack and shopping, and probably a tourist, strides purposefully along while a boy reaches into the pocket of his shorts.

Both youngsters are pickpockets and both are also almost certainly the offspring of Roma gipsies.

The scenes outside the main railway station in Milan highlight an issue that is dividing Italy  -  what to do with the country's population of Roma immigrants and how to tackle the crime that's become associated with them.

Sleight of hand: A child pickpocket at work

Children, all below the age they can be prosecuted, are sent out by their parents to steal cash, cards and phones  -  in fact anything that can be sold on.

Many Italians view the Roma with suspicion and in recent months there has been vigilante action, including a firebomb attack on a camp outside Naples.

The promise of a crackdown on crime and illegal immigration helped bring the centre-Right government of Silvio Berlusconi to power in April.

Mr Berlusconi's interior minister Roberto Maroni, of the anti-immigration Northern League, has vowed to fingerprint all Roma children.

The measure  -  which Mr Maroni insists is nothing more than a census  -  has attracted fierce criticism from children's charity UNICEF, the EU and opposition MPs.

Under it, fingerprints will be taken during a census of gipsy camps in an effort to establish who is in the country legally and who is not.

Those found without the correct paperwork will be expelled after three months.

Mr Maroni says the fingerprinting will allow police to identify youngsters caught begging. Their parents would then be questioned and risk losing custody of them.

Mr Maroni insists this would protect the children by deterring families from sending them out to steal.

Yesterday a police spokesman in Milan said: 'Pickpocketing by Roma gipsy children is a big problem across the city but especially so in and around the station.

'Groups of children arrive there every morning with their parents who then go off to beg, busk or steal themselves, while they leave the youngsters to pickpocket.

'Our hands are tied because in the vast majority of cases the pickpockets are under 14 and therefore cannot be prosecuted.

'Often they say they don't know who their parents are so we put them into care and they just escape.'

Last night Italy's biggest selling magazine, the Roman Catholic weekly Famiglia Cristiana, joined in the condemnation of the fingerprinting scheme.

In an editorial it denounced the idea as an 'indecent proposal' and said that at its first test the new government had 'failed for its zero value of human dignity'.

Pinch point: Another boy, also probably a Roma, dips into a bag outside Milan station

The magazine also launched an astonishing attack on Alessandra Mussolini, president of Italy's Children's Commission, and granddaughter of wartime dictator Benito Mussolini, who introduced racist laws into Italy in 1938.

It said: 'The silence of Alessandra Mussolini does not surprise us because ethnic profiling and screening obviously forms part of her DNA.'

Last night Osvaldo Napoli, of the centre-Right People of Freedom Party, said opposition politicians should stop shedding 'crocodile tears' over the fingerprint plan.

He added: 'Maybe the Left dreams of an Italy populated by lots of Oliver Twists exploited by the Fagin on duty.'

The interior ministry says there are 152,000 Roma living in Italy.