Protesters rounded up during the 2001 summit of the Group of Eight (G8) major economies in Genoa were tortured, Italy’s police chief Franco Gabrielli said on Wednesday, in the clearest official admission of responsibility to date for the incidents.
Gabrielli spoke a month after the European Court of Human Rights established for a second time that Italian police brutality in Genoa amounted to torture, and after the Italian parliament adopted a long-delayed law criminalizing acts of torture.
“I say it clearly, there was torture. Torture,” Gabrielli told La Repubblica newspaper.
Police reacted violently following street clashes on July 20, 2001, in which a protester was shot dead by a policeman.
Overnight, they raided a school where hundreds of protesters were sleeping, and took hundreds of people to a military barracks where violence took place.
Gabrielli said public security at the G8 meeting was “simply a catastrophe,” but he stressed that Italian police had since come a long way, as shown by the relatively peaceful management of protests at this year’s G7 and EU summits in Taormina, Sicily, and Rome.
The police chief also chided his predecessor Gianni De Gennaro for not resigning following the Genoa incidents.
“If I had been [him] I would have assumed my responsibilities, no ifs or buts,” Gabrielli said.
He acknowledged that De Gennaro’s refusal to step down had “important” and “long-term effects” in terms of fuelling a climate of impunity within the Italian police. (NAN)