A large pool of blood flows from the nape of the neck towards the center of the road. Other red trickles disfigure the face of a dead man. The lifeless body is that of Abderrahim Fakir and a new video shows him after his death, supine, with his mouth wide open and that pool of blood that had never emerged until today. “Before being thrown to the ground, Fakir’s face and head were intact,” thunders the man’s lawyer, Fabio Anselmo, explaining that he is unable to interpret the presence of blood “because I don’t do medico-legal reconstructions.”
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“He injured the back of his neck by dragging himself on the ground,” replies the lawyer for the police officers registered under article 45 bis for the death of the 42-year-old, last Sunday, during an arrest in Bologna’s Pilastro district. The same place where a large procession organized by collectives and committees is expected tomorrow, a week after clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement in the center of Bologna. What is causing debate, however, is the new video, also recorded from the window of one of the apartments on via Svevo, which shows the phases following Fakir’s death. A forensic agent approaches the body, still wrapped in a sheet and with his ankles tied – as he had been during the arrest – and uncovers it. Under the nape of the neck, a pool of blood is evident, seeming to originate directly from the skull. This hypothesis has inevitably sparked an intense back-and-forth between Fakir’s defense and that of the police officers who immobilized the man last Sunday.
“How did all that blood get into his lungs? He inhaled it because they beat him. It’s not external blood. What does cocaine have to do with it? Cocaine doesn’t cause all this,” explains Fabio Anselmo. The pool of blood, replies Gabriele Bordoni, comes “from the nape of the neck,” which the victim injures “by dragging himself on the ground,” while those on the face are the “trickles that slid forward when his face was downwards.” “There is only one injury Fakir inflicts on himself while being restrained,” explains the lawyer, and it is “to the nape of the neck,” when he bites the officer’s leg, “drags himself on the ground and scratches himself. Then with the spray, he quickly recoils and in pulling back, he injures the nape of his neck again.” Reconstructions that will evidently be examined by investigators who are trying to precisely reconstruct the methods and timing of what happened last Sunday afternoon.
However, the former president of the Bologna Court, Francesco Maria Caruso, is convinced that not only police protocols but also the provisions of the European Court of Human Rights were violated during the arrest. A magistrate who, during his career, also handled the case of Federico Aldrovandi, repeatedly evoked after Pilastro. “Fakir’s death seems to result from a prolonged compression of the victim’s face and chest by two officers who immobilize him on the ground, indifferent to pleas for help, with the involvement of a third citizen. An action prohibited by police protocols themselves,” he writes on social media. The officers – concludes the magistrate – do not need “shields but adequate tools, skills, training, and personnel.”
According to Anselmo, the long-standing defender of the Cucchi family and now alongside Fakir’s relatives, “we are facing a useless circus, where we are performing a script.” “Which should have been two acts, at least three,” he adds, “but instead it will be half an act and that’s it. Then the curtain will fall. This is Salvini’s penal shield.” Meanwhile, on the day the mayor of Bologna, Matteo Lepore, files a complaint against online threats received, a Facebook comment cost a carabinieri brigadier his transfer. “One less,” Walter Lombardi had written on social media commenting on Fakir’s death. Then he had invoked the Duce, adding “bum bum bum.” The soldier, who was serving with the Bologna radiomobile unit, was reportedly transferred to Imola, where he has already taken up duty.
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