They forced a boy, stopped for identification, to pee on the ground and then dragged him in that direction “using him as a rag to clean the floor”. Another was kicked in the head until he was unconscious. And again: they sprayed the stinging spray in the eyes of the detainees, insulting them with phrases such as “Tunisian shit, son of a bitch, what are you doing here?”. They did it because they hated “blacks”, claims the judge who ordered house arrest for five agents of the Flying squad of the Verona Police Headquarters. In fact, the aggravating circumstance of racial hatred was contested for two of them.
Or even just out of boredom. A man, for example, “was dragged by his limbs to the ‘Stop’ room, to then deposit him on the floor where he lay still wet with urine for over twenty minutes in the throes of spasms caused by breathing difficulties, due to the previous use on his spray person”. And when he was lying on the ground “they mocked him and flashed a torch at him”.
After the beatings the group boasted, “Didn’t you kill him?”
Here is the sample of violence inside the Verona Police Headquarters, overwhelmed by the investigation conducted by the Mobile police colleagues. In the register of suspects there are at least 15 names of men and women in uniform. The samples, summarized in the 169 pages of the precautionary custody order signed by the investigating judge Livia Magri, it is chilling, to use the words of the Commissioner of Verona. “A custom in the unjustified use of physical violence by suspects on subjects subjected to control or detained”, writes the judge. After the beatings, the group boasted. “How come she didn’t kill him?” they said to each other, laughing. “Don’t forget the ones you didn’t give him before, give them to him later”.
The investigation revolves around an agent, Alexander Best, 25-year-old from Torre del Greco for two years in service in Verona, to whom two of the seven episodes of torture and physical abuse are contested, documented, during the seven months of the investigators’ work, by the images of the hidden video cameras that Mobile has placed in the ‘Stop’ room of the Police Headquarters. A room that is not far from sight but is a sort of aquarium with a plexiglass window. So it’s hard to think that no one, in addition to the arrested, the suspects and the twenty transferred agents, saw anything.
Even money stolen from those arrested
In the investigation there is the story of very small donations of money – a few tens of euros stolen from the arrested – but according to what the investigating judge reconstructs, the arrested moved without a real motivation. In some cases the “purpose of discrimination or ethnic, national, racial hatred” is disputed. What happens when they stop AT, an undocumented foreigner stopped during a street check, is emblematic. The assistant Robert DaRold, arrested, together with another colleague under investigation, “hit him with kicks, slaps and shoves”. “He made him bang his head violently against the bench in the police station, and threatened him to use the stinging spray again”. The inspector Philip Failla Rifici (under house arrest) threatened him by saying “I’ll spray you in the ass” while his colleagues, despite the detainee being on the ground, “continued to hit him repeatedly with slaps and kicks, first in the drafting room and then in the corridor, to then drag him into the room ‘ Stop'”.