The heads of the police

Under trial in Genoa, in close hearing and plea bargaining, some of the people who were then at the top of the police for the bloody raid in the Diaz school during the G8 summit of 2001. The police entered the school, granted by the municipality at the Genoa Social Forum, beat ferociously everyone who was inside and then arrested them.

In addition, officially by mistake, they entered the close Pascoli school to seize computers and materials. The official justification was that some demonstrators dressed in black had attacked a police car near the school a few hours before. But this version has changed several times in the declarations of the police and has never found any confirmation. The legal pretext to enter the school without any arrest warrant was that the police suspected that there were weapons stored. Later the police showed knives and Molotov cocktails that they claimed to have seized inside Diaz, but then it was discovered that they had brought these objects inside.
Meanwhile several people who were in school, many of them foreign journalists, reported serious injuries in the beating of the police but were soon released because there was no crime to charge them. For the former chief of police of the period, now director of the Department of Information for Security Gianni de Gennaro, the prosecutor asked two years of imprisonment, and for the former head of Genoa police Spartaco Mortola, now vice quaestor of Turin, the prosecution asked 1 year and 4 months in prison. They would have asked the former quaestor of Genova Francesco Colucci to lie to judges about the raid. The prosecutor read in court the wiretapping that would demonstrate the guilt of De Gennaro and Mortola. The ruling is expected in September.
Colucci when questioned for the first time said that De Gennaro and Mortola had knowledge of violence, then, after a phone call from them, he said in the first hearing that De Gennaro was unaware of anything. De Gennaro and Mortola reject the charges and requested and obtained the abbreviated trial, while Colucci preferred the ordinary one.
There are a few things to note in all this. The first is that the discovery of a behavior at the very least not entirely honourable by the heads of the police was possible due to wiretapping, that with Berlusconi's new law would be very difficult to do and that the newspapers could not publish.
The second is that the policemen, officers and leaders involved in the facts of the G8 are really many and most of them suffered no serious consequences from their behaviour or even had brilliant careers. De Gennaro was even special Commissioner for waste in Campania, appointed by the Prodi government. On the facts of the Diaz school in practice, only the policemen and the first simple levels of command have been punished, while the heads were all acquitted. Even for the Bolzaneto violences against the demonstrators arrested during the G8 sentences were very mild, many were the acquittals and was not possible to challenge the accused of the crime of torture because Italy has never included it in the Criminal Code, despite the signing of our country under the international convention. Some politicians have repeatedly asked for a commission of inquiry on what happened, but then, for one reason or another, it has never been done. The first commission of inquiry set up by the Berlusconi government in 2001, was considered totally inadequate by Amnesty International. The Prodi government in 2006 had it in the program but the commission never started due to the differences of Di Pietro and the opposition from Mastella. Meanwhile, senior police officers who have dealt with so exemplary efficency in 2001, with indiscriminate beatings of peaceful and unarmed protesters and no true black block ever arrested, are still well placed in law enforcement. And the person who has the primary responsibility of what happened then, today governs Italy again.