A Facebook user claiming to be a
State Police officer wrote on his profile Tuesday that he was in
the unit that conducted a 2001 raid on anti-G8 protesters in
Genoa, and that he would do it again.
"I was at the Diaz (school, where the protesters were
camping out) that night," Fabio Tortosa wrote on his profile.
"I would go back in there a thousand times".
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) last Tuesday
condemned Italy, finding that torture had occurred during the
raid.
In response, the government sped up a reading of its
anti-torture bill, with the Lower House on Thursday approving an
amendment increasing the maximum prison sentence for public
officials found guilty of torture from 12 to 15 years.
State Police are investigating the authorship of the post
and will initiate disciplinary proceedings should Tortosa turn
out to be a member of the force, the department said in a
statement.
The Diaz raid is perhaps Italy's most notorious case of
police brutality.
In the night assault on the Diaz school, hundreds of police
attacked about 100 activists and a few journalists, wounding 82
and seriously injuring 61 - three critically and one, British
journalist Mark Covell, left in a coma with rib and spinal
injuries.
Officers planted evidence including two Molotov cocktails
and hammers and knives from a nearby construction site to
justify the raid.
Amnesty International called the event "the most serious
suspension of democratic rights in a Western country since the
Second World War".
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