A Moroccan man died on Sunday in Bologna, northern Italy, while being restrained by police officers, spurring investigations into both the police and the emergency responders at the scene.
Amid a growing outcry in Italy, the death drew comparisons to the killing of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 as he was pinned to the ground. The death in Italy set off protests on Sunday night in Bologna, where hundreds of people demonstrated, some of whom waved Moroccan flags and hung a banner denouncing “police violence and racism.”
The Moroccan man, Abderrahim Fakir, 42, died in the Pilastro neighborhood of Bologna after being held to the ground by two police officers and a person in civilian clothes, according to video verified by The New York Times. The video also shows two people nearby, dressed in the red uniforms of emergency medical workers. Those two were joined, the footage shows, by two other emergency medical workers after the officers stepped away.
Mr. Fakir had lived in Italy since he was a small child and was a legal resident at the time of his death, said Barbara Spinelli, an immigration lawyer who was working with him to renew his residence permit. Mr. Fakir ran a business, said Ms. Spinelli, who did not give further details.
In a statement, the Bologna police department said that officers had responded to a call reporting “a person in a violent rage.” The police said that the officers had been “assisted by citizens” while trying to “subdue the individual” after “damage to a car,” without clarifying what that meant.
“After the containment efforts were carried out,” the statement said, “the individual died.”
The Bologna health authority said that an ambulance staffed by four Red Cross volunteers was dispatched to the scene at 12:17 p.m. on Sunday and that those volunteers called for a medical consultation at 12:30 p.m. A vehicle carrying a doctor and a nurse arrived at the scene at 12:53 p.m. and pronounced Mr. Fakir dead, the health authority said.
The prosecutor’s office in Bologna said that it had opened an investigation into the actions of both the police and emergency medical workers. The Bologna health authority said that it was also investigating the first four Red Cross volunteers who were on the scene when Mr. Fakir died. The Italian Red Cross said in a statement that it “extended its condolences” to Mr. Fakir’s family and was cooperating with investigators assessing his death.
In the video, one officer squats on Mr. Fakir’s back and holds his head face down on the street, while another, straddling his lower back, tries to restrain Mr. Fakir’s hands. The man in civilian clothing holds Mr. Fakir’s feet. For several minutes, Mr. Fakir squirms and yells for help. As well as the four emergency medical workers and the man in civilian clothing, at least three other civilians can be seen in the video nearby.
Hundreds of protesters came out in the surrounding neighborhood on Sunday night to condemn the police. Bologna’s mayor, Matteo Lepore, a member of the center-left Democratic Party, called for a demonstration in front of City Hall on Monday night “to demand truth and justice regarding the death of Abderrahim Fakir.”
At the protest, Khadija Fakir, Mr. Fakir’s sister, told reporters: “We want justice for Fakir. They killed him in cold blood. They killed my brother without pity. Without pity. I want truth for my brother.”
The office of the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has not made an official statement about the death.
Galeazzo Bignami, the leader of Ms. Meloni’s far-right party in the lower house of the Italian Parliament, said on Sunday: “A person’s death is always a tragic event. We are awaiting the outcome of the necessary investigations currently underway.” He added that he believed the police operation was “conducted professionally and in a manner appropriate to the situation at hand.”
Matteo Salvini, Italy’s infrastructure minister, who is from a separate far-right party in Ms. Meloni’s coalition, told reporters on Monday: “I am always on the side of the police no matter what. We’ll wait to understand what happened.”
Silvia Miglietta, a culture commissioner in Puglia, southern Italy, pointed to the similarities between Mr. Fakir’s death and that of Mr. Floyd, whose killing helped galvanize a nationwide protest movement in the United States.
Ms. Miglietta wore an “I can’t breathe” T-shirt on Monday at a government event, referencing the words Mr. Floyd gasped while Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck during the murder on a Minneapolis street corner.
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