Sixty-four police officers were injured in Bologna, Italy when a July 20 left-wing demonstration over the death of Abderrahim Fakir, a 42-year-old Moroccan-born man who died while being restrained by police, descended into a night of rioting.
Protesters threw Molotov cocktails, set cars on fire, tore apart dumpsters, and vandalized property.
Francesco Giubilei, president of the conservative think tank Nazione Futura and a former special adviser to the culture minister in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government, told The Epoch Times that “many politicians on the left did not want to wait for investigators to establish how Fakir, a man who was known for taking drugs, had died.”
“Within minutes of his death, they were already claiming that ICE had arrived in Italy and that Bologna had its own George Floyd case,” he said.
How the Arrest Unfolded
Officers were called to Bologna’s Pilastro district on the morning of July 19 after a neighbor reported a man behaving erratically and kicking garage doors. Residents had also contacted police to report that Fakir assaulted the driver of a car pulling into a garage, according to local media reports.
The officers requested medical assistance and attempted to calm Fakir down. However, Fakir lunged at the two officers and tried to bite them. The officers responded by using pepper spray before restraining him in a prone position, reports said.
A 5-minute video circulating in the Italian media shows two officers pinning Fakir face down as he cries out, while a third man, who does not appear to be a police officer, holds down his legs and emergency workers stand nearby.
About two minutes into the video, Fakir ceases resisting. The officers proceed to secure his wrists and ankles with restraints. Shortly afterward, one officer notices that he is motionless and strikes him twice on the cheek in an apparent attempt to elicit a response. When emergency medical personnel reach him moments later, Fakir appears to have lost consciousness.
Full Video Is 39 Minutes
The video drew outrage on the left.
“If the right wants to import the ICE model, this is the wrong country for it,” said Francesco Boccia of the left-wing Democratic Party.
Bologna Mayor Matteo Lepore told Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper that anyone who watched the video was “shocked,” and called for a demonstration in Central Bologna.
“You can’t die like this,” Fakir’s sister, Khadija Fakir, told Italian media. “They killed him mercilessly, and I want the truth.”
Bologna prosecutors have opened an investigation into the two officers and the medical personnel present, and have ordered an autopsy to determine whether the restraint, a medical emergency, or drug intoxication caused the death. The officers, who handed their bodycam footage to investigators, remain on duty.
The original recording runs for 39 minutes and has not been made public.
A criminal record
Asked what police had done wrong in detaining Fakir, Domenico Pianese, secretary-general of the police union, defended the operation. “Judging from the images we saw, the intervention was carried out correctly,” he said.
The Red Cross also described the response as standard procedure, noting that paramedics can intervene only once police give them the green light.
Pianese noted Fakir’s criminal record: “An arrest as a minor for drug possession, one in 2004 for drug trafficking,” which brought a sentence of four years and three months; “a charge in 2005 for the same offense, an arrest in 2019 for resisting a public official, and another in 2022 for causing bodily harm.”
Barbara Spinelli, the lawyer handling Fakir’s residency permit application, wrote on Facebook that he was a hard worker and a kind man, adding: “Ask yourselves why he died in the hands of those who had an institutional duty to protect his life.”
Fakir worked in logistics for a moving and handling company.
The Mayor Under Fire
The rally for “truth and justice” called by Lepore began without incident in Piazza del Nettuno on July 20, but it degenerated into chaos after some protesters marched on the prefecture and clashed with police, local media reported.
Several right-wing politicians have called on Lepore to resign.
Giubilei described the decision to hold the event the day after Fakir’s death, and under those conditions, as at best “unwise,” and said Lepore had sought to “use this death politically.”
“No one yet knew what had really happened. Calling a rally the very next day, in a city with a history of far-left street violence, made the outcome entirely predictable,” he said.
In an open letter to the city after the violence, Lepore wrote that the clashes “do not represent Bologna,” adding: “Anyone who thinks they can respond to violence with violence is stepping outside the rule of law. And therefore they are stepping outside our democratic community.”
“What happened in Bologna is unacceptable,” Meloni wrote on social media. “It is imperative that any responsibility for Abderrahim Fakir’s death be established with the utmost rigor. ... But nothing can justify violence against the police.”
She further added that “those who chose to use this incident as a pretext to set the city ablaze, attack officers, and sow violence, endangering the safety of citizens who had nothing to do with the unrest, weren’t seeking the truth: they were seeking confrontation,” accusing them of “fostering a climate of hatred and delegitimization of an entire body of the State.”
