“The kick, the push or any violent gesture that made little Mehmet fall” on the night of May 22, 2019 were “the last violent outrage inflicted on him not unlike the numerous beatings that had already left wounds on his body”. A final and fatal move caused by his father Alijca Hrustic who, according to the appellate judges of Milan, “fits perfectly into a unitary conduct of mistreatment” that “could evolve towards the death of the victim himself”. With this motivation, the judges of the second degree have redeveloped the crime of voluntary homicide into that of pluri-aggravated mistreatment culminating in the death of the child challenged by the twenty-six-year-old Florentine of Croatian origins.
Child killed in Milan, life sentence was canceled on appeal: “It wasn’t murder”
Andrea Siravo
The sentence came on March 9 when the college (president by Ivana Caputo, adjudicator Franca Anelli) canceled the life sentence by inflicting 28 years in prison on Hrustic, defended by the lawyer Giuseppe De Lalla. According to the reconstruction of the court “the acute physical sufferings suffered by Mehmet” such as lacerations of the upper lip, the bites on the arms and back and the burns with open flame under the feet could not be punished with the crime of torture but as an “event aggravator “of the crime of ill-treatment. A dispute, which instead, the prosecutor Giovanna Cavalleri had seen herself recognized by the first judges after she for the first time in Italy she had challenged the torture, introduced in 2017, in the context of domestic violence.
In multiple passages of the motivations, the judges of the Assize Court of Appeal have judged “unreliable” the version of events of Hrustic’s wife and mother of the child, and noted “an ambiguity” of his procedural position. According to the investigation, the little boy had his feet covered with burns. In the first instance, the assize court had considered credible the version of Mehmet’s mother, who had accused her father of having burned them with the lighter.
On this point, unlike the first instance judges, the Court of Assizes of Appeal accepted the defensive version that the burns resulted from “a domestic accident”, with electric plates left unattended on the floor. “Well, even in this case – we read – it was insensitive villainy to have limited ourselves to a rough bandage instead of rushing to the first emergency room for a professional medication”. And again: “Having ignored the unbearable pain that burns so deep, which prevent you from placing your feet on the ground without excruciating spasms, is an expression of ruthlessness.”
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