An investigation was opened Monday in Italy after the death of a Moroccan pinned to the ground by two police officers during an arrest the day before in Bologna (north), announced the prosecutor, a tragedy which provoked the indignation of part of public opinion.
• Also read: Wall Street ends in the red, opts for caution
• Also read: The US military announces a new series of strikes against Iran
• Also read: Paris denounces “extremely serious intimidation action” against two French diplomats in Iran
Excerpts from a video shot by a local resident and widely shared by the Italian media show the victim, aged 42, being subjected to a ventral tackle for several minutes.
“Help, help!” » says Abderrahim Fakir, a Moroccan who arrived in Italy at the age of five, several times, while the two police officers immobilize him on the ground under the gaze of two men in ambulance outfits.
The victim, moaning, then appears inert, his face against the asphalt, while the police officers tie him hand and foot. One of them ends up tapping him on the shoulder to check if he is still conscious.
The images from the intervention cameras of the two police officers were made available to the courts, the Bologna police headquarters said in a press release, specifying that the officers had intervened after local residents had reported a man experiencing “violent anger”.
“We can’t die like this!” » denounced Khadija Fakir, the victim’s sister, to the daily Corriere della Sera.
“The police must protect us (…) If someone is agitated, we must calm them down, not kill them like a dog,” she said, her voice laced with anger, in a video.
The center-left mayor of Bologna, Matteo Lepore, called to “shed light” on these events and called for a rally on Monday in the city center, attended by several hundred people, according to media reports.
“Justice and truth for Fakir!” » “State assassins”, could we read on banners brandished by the demonstrators, according to images published on social networks.
“Anyone who makes prejudicial remarks against the police means that they have no confidence in our law enforcement nor in the judicial system, which will have to investigate what happened,” Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi told the television news of the public channel Rai Uno.
Far-right Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini and Galeazzo Bignami, head of the Fratelli d’Italia (FdI, far-right) parliamentary group, the party of head of government Giorgia Meloni, defended the two police officers.
Opposition senator Ilaria Cucchi, whose brother died in detention in 2009, told AFP of her disgust at certain messages of “solidarity” and “thank you” addressed to the police.
The senator also accuses Giorgia Meloni and her coalition government of having “favored this type of behavior” through “their policies entirely motivated by hatred and racism”.
Abderrahim Fakir “was a very kind, educated and respectful person,” Barbara Spinelli, a lawyer who assisted the Moroccan forty-year-old last year with an application to renew his residence permit, told the Ansa news agency.
Although residing and working legally in Italy, the latter feared being deported.
“I told him: ‘We are in Italy, a democratic country. Here, the police respect the rules,'” said the lawyer.
