Protests erupt in Bologna after Moroccan man dies under police restraint, sparking investigation

Police have clashed with demonstrators during a protest in the Italian city of Bologna after a Moroccan-born man died pleading for help under police restraint.

Human rights campaigners and Italy’s opposition parties have demanded urgent answers over the death on Sunday of Abderrahim Fakir, 42, who had lived in Italy since he was five years old and ran a small removals and cleaning business.

A video shared widely on Italian media shows Fakir, who reportedly had heart issues and asthma, repeatedly calling out “aiuto, aiuto, basta” (Help, help, that’s enough) as two officers sit on him and ambulance workers look on.

After he stops moving, the police officers are seen binding his ankles together, only later checking his vital signs with the ambulance workers, the video shows. Prosecutors have opened an investigation and requested the officers’ body cam footage.

“You can’t die like this,” Fakir’s sister, Khadija, told the Corriere della Sera newspaper. “The police have to protect us. If someone is agitated, you have to calm them down … not kill them like a dog.”

Italian media reported that police had been called to the scene, in the north-eastern neighbourhood of Pilastro, shortly after noon on Sunday by local residents who were concerned by Fakir’s erratic and aggressive behaviour.

The officers reportedly called emergency services soon after they arrived, and tried to calm Fakir before using pepper spray and holding him down while trying to handcuff him. They told ambulance personnel that he was “having a psychiatric episode”.

During the protests late on Monday, firecrackers were thrown near police buildings and police reacted using teargas and water cannon. A group of demonstrators also sat down in a square holding a photograph of Fakir, the Ansa news agency reported.

The incident has been compared in Italy to George Floyd’s murder in the US six years ago, and also prompted comparisons with tactics used by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Donald Trump.

However, Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Piantedosi, told public television: “Whoever makes insulting remarks against the police shows they have no trust in our law enforcement nor in our justice system [and] should look into what happened.”

Tommaso Foti, the European affairs minister, said: “The chants of ‘police murderers’ and ‘the whole world hates you’ shouted during a demonstration in Bologna … are disgraceful.”

The far-right deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, also defended the police, while Galeazzo Bignami, head of prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party in parliament’s lower house, praised the officers’ “professional conduct”.

Ilaria Cucchi, a senator whose brother died in custody in 2009, told Agence-France Presse she was sickened by the “solidarity and thanks” expressed to police after such an “inhumane act”.

Cucchi, a member of the opposition Greens and Left alliance (AVS) party, criticised Meloni and her coalition government, saying their “policies seeped in hatred and racism” had fostered a climate of violence.

Francesco Boccia, head of the centre-left Democratic party (PD) in the senate, told La Repubblica daily: “If the right wants to import the ICE model, this is the wrong country for it. We have democratic antibodies.”

Barbara Spinelli, a lawyer, told Ansa she had met Fakir last year when he applied to renew his permit to stay. He had been “a very kind, well educated, respectful person” who was in Italy legally but worried about being expelled, she said.

“I told him: ‘We are in Italy, a democratic country. Here the police respect the rules,’” she said. “I don’t know how I will ever again manage to tell someone they don’t need to be afraid.”