Italy: Four police officers charged with torturing a Romani man and then lying during the investigation
Four police officers who have been under investigation after a house search they performed two and a half years ago in the Italian capital resulted in a 36-year-old Romani man falling into a coma are now facing charges of attempted murder, giving false statements, and torture. Hasib Omerović, who has been deaf since birth, suffered serious injuries on 25 July 2020 when he "fell" from a height of nine meters through the window of his bedroom during an unauthorized police raid on his apartment.
Omerović remains today in an Intensive Care Unit’s neurological rehabilitation ward in a state of “minimal consciousness”, the European Roma Rights Centre reported last week. In response to a parliamentary question by Italian Deputy Riccardo Magi concerning progress on the investigation and measures taken against the offending police officers, Nicola Molteni, an Undersecretary of State at the Italian Ministry of the Interior, responded on 18 November that the public prosecutor’s office at the court of Rome has: “initiated a criminal proceeding for the crimes of giving false information to the public prosecutor, false ideology committed by a public official in the course of public deeds, and torture, delegating the mobile teams of the Rome police headquarters to the related investigations.”
As regards the charge of providing false information to the prosecutor, the police officers claimed in their initial statement that Omerović, “threw himself out of the window, falling into the internal courtyard of the building, where he was then rescued by the 118 who transferred him to Gemelli Hospital”. That account was completely at odds with Omerović’s sister’s account of what happened: “I opened the door and a woman and men who were dressed normally entered, the woman closed the door to the hallway, asked for Hasib’s documents, took photos, they beat him with a stick, Hasib fell and they started punching and kicking him…he ran into his room and shut himself in…they broke down the door…they punched and kicked him, got him off of his feet and then threw him down.”
The police account also does not square with the state of the apartment when the rest of the family returned later that fateful morning to find their home in disarray, Omerović’s documents scattered on a table, the door to his room smashed, and a broom handle broken in two; in addition, a radiator pipe had been wrenched from the wall, window shutters had been forced open, and they found traces of Omerović’s blood on a sweatshirt and on his bedsheets. In his parliamentary question, Deputy Magi also asked if “due to the seriousness of the crimes and the unlawful acts that emerged from the investigations, precautionary measures have been taken against the suspects.”
As reported by the local organization Associazione 21 luglio, Undersecretary Molteni replied that since criminal proceedings are still pending in the preliminary investigation stage and are covered by investigative secrecy, no disciplinary proceedings have been initiated against the officers involved in the unauthorized raid. Carlo Stasolla of Associazione 21 luglio warned that the failure to suspend the officers from duty pending the investigations runs the risk of minimizing the gravity of what happened on the morning of 25 July in the apartment in the Primavalle quarter of Rome and that the state is falling short when it comes to finding the whole truth as demanded by Hasib’s mother, Fatima Sejdovic.
