“By surviving the torture I suffered, I won the most important match. Maybe my experience as a footballer helped me psychologically, otherwise I don’t know if I would have made it.” Mattia Falcinellithe Italian student arrested and “hooked” by the Miami police for no reason, said these words to his mother Vlasta Studenivova talking about the arrest he was subjected to in Florida. An arrest, without reason, also because in addition to the video released exclusively by the National Newspaper, there are other videos recorded by the body-cams of the Miami policemen, which as reported by Repubblica, testify that the boy never touched the policemen. The young man appears confused and continues to ask for his cell phones back. A request that continues because smartphones contain credit cards, the app for university payments and other data and documents. At that point the policemen – who at a certain point became as many as nine – put him on the ground and handcuffed him, on the ground one of the officers puts a knee on his neck. An image that has very sad precedents in the USA.
Mother: “She just wanted her phones” – In the report that the police released, written under oath by the officers, there is not a single word that corresponds to what is seen in the footage. It says something completely different,” the young man’s mother later told In Mezz’ora. “Matteo he wanted to go get his two phones left in the bar and asked for them, but instead of assisting him, the officers asked him to leave. Then he began to turn to the officers asking them why they weren’t doing their job to serve the citizens, but at that moment he touched the badge of one of the officers with his finger and the attack and arrest began from there.”
The arrest does not only involve handcuffing, the officers put their knee on Matteo’s neck, preventing him from breathing as in the sad case of George Floyd. When the policeman gets up, while he is unconscious, the security guard arrives behind him and carries Matteo’s phones in his hands: this is proof that my son was not lying and had the right to ask for those phones“, adds the woman. Vlasta Studenivova also explained that “Matthew is now on the university campus, where they are there to monitor him day and night because he is afraid of everyone and all his desire to live has turned into a nightmare of living“.
The jurists: “Torture” – “There are international rules on human rights that cannot be violated either in Italy, or in Europe or even in the United States: the universal principle of the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment applies and there is no doubt that the hogtieing which has been the Italian student Matteo Falcinelli was subjected to it in the USA it was brutal tortureone of the cruelest and oldest practices of torture” underlines the lawyer Aurora D’Agostino, the vice president of the ‘Democratic Jurists’ association who is an international observer, on behalf of the European ‘Eldh’ network of jurists attentive to human rights, to the trial underway in Budapest against Ilaria Salis, the Italian teacher detained in Hungary in dramatic conditions.
The Farnesina – Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani has already had the United States ambassador to Italy urge maximum attention to the case of Matteo Falcinelli, the Italian arrested in Miami in February Jack Markell, recalling that the Italian Government dutifully follows every case of detention of Italian citizens abroad. Upon his arrest, Mr. Falcinelli was subjected to a particularly violent prison treatment, witnessed by the same body-cams of the policemen who carried out the arrest. For this reason, in addition to following the case and providing assistance to the family for the legal aspects, the consul general in Miami underlined with the local authorities the unacceptability of the treatments that the young man underwent, the Farnesina said. Falcinelli had been arrested outside a nightclub. The Miami police had charged him with several crimes, including non-violent resistance to a public official. He was released two days after the arrest. The consulate general in Miami immediately took action: in addition to intervening with the local authorities, he provided the necessary assistance to his compatriot and family members, also providing contacts for the legal office, then chosen by the family. Until the conclusion of the matter, the consulate general, in agreement with the Farnesina, will continue to assist the compatriot, maintaining close contact with the family.