The government's preventive shutdown of demonstrations has been implemented for the first time: 91 people were targeted in Rome during a ceremony commemorating the anarchists Sara Ardizzone and Alessandro Mercogliano, the two militants who died on March 19 in the capital while making a bomb in a farmhouse in the Parco degli Acquedotti.
Dozens of people had gathered near that site and near a church that morning—despite a ban on demonstrations imposed by the police—for the commemoration, amid chants and bouquets of red and black flowers, the colors of one of the anarchist flags. A large contingent of police, some on horseback, monitored the situation, and within a short time, several groups of anarchists were blocked at various entrances to the Acquedotti park, near the farmhouse. Ninety-one people, deemed dangerous and suspicious, were placed in preventive detention , approved by the public prosecutor on duty. The measure, introduced a few weeks ago, allows police officers during specific operations to escort suspects to their offices and detain them for up to twelve hours . The protesters were then made to board police buses and escorted to the police headquarters, the immigration office, where there is more space.
"The neighborhood was militarized. It was a mass identification and there was a show of force, including people in uniform on horseback," some protesters immediately reported on anarchist websites. Eight hours later, almost all of those held in pre-trial detention—according to some of their lawyers—were still being held in police headquarters. "The people were held in holding cells with about ten people in each room and were able to communicate by cell phone," explained lawyer Paola Bevere. " My client, a forty-year-old, was stopped in the street after breakfast. She had no intention of going to the march because she had a late-morning train ."
The demonstration still went ahead, and after the commemoration, a procession headed toward the working-class neighborhood of Centocelle. During the ceremony near the farmhouse, a journalist and a TGR news crew were also attacked : "The journalist," a statement from the news outlet explains, "was simply asking a question to one of the protesters when she was threatened and her microphone thrown to the ground."
For Giorgia Meloni it is proof that «the security decree works, it does not serve to limit the freedom to demonstrate, as a certain left wing party claimed, on the contrary it serves to guarantee that demonstrations take place in a peaceful and non-violent manner , as the Constitution provides, and to protect those who want to exercise that right in a civil manner, without violence and without devastation».
The government, the prime minister assured, "will continue to move in this direction, providing more tools to ensure safety for all and more protection for those who wish to demonstrate peacefully."
(Unioneonline)
