"If the issue is to stop a person who is running away, I cannot put him in a dangerous situation." Former police chief Franco Gabrielli, now a security consultant for the mayor of Milan, spoke about the death of Ramy Elgaml, the 19-year-old who last November was on a scooter driven by a friend and chased by the carabinieri, explaining that "it is obvious that that is not the correct way to conduct a chase because there is still a license plate, a vehicle."
"There is a fundamental principle," he explained in an interview with 24 Mattino on Radio 24, "and that is the proportionality of the actions that must be implemented to obtain a certain result : I can even use a weapon if a life is in danger, but if the issue is to stop a person who is running away, I cannot put him in a dangerous situation. This is an elementary principle of legal civilization."
The case, for which Fares Bouzidi, the boy who was driving the scooter Ramy was on, and some carabinieri are under investigation, has sparked a political controversy that Gabrielli, also speaking of "excessive criminalization of law enforcement officers", would like to curb . "We do not always divide ourselves - he urged - from those who defend themselves regardless, which for example from my point of view is a dangerous attitude because defense regardless introduces an element of impunity, and on the other hand the accusation regardless, that is, criminalization regardless and the fact that the police force is always or must always be in the dock".
The case
From an initial service note in which there was no trace of contact between the vehicles, to subsequent investigations, with traces of paint found, which led to the hypothesis of an accidental collision during the chase, up to the hypothesis under evaluation of a voluntary ramming. A month and a half has passed since the death of Ramy Elgaml, and after the acquisition of videos of what happened that night, in which shocking phrases can be heard, the Milan Prosecutor's Office could end up charging one or more soldiers with voluntary homicide with eventual intent.
"The ones I saw in the video, one, two, three, are the wrong Carabinieri. But there are also the real Carabinieri. They are not all the same and I trust the right ones", explained Yehia Elgaml, Ramy's father, who with his words, after his son's death on November 24, had managed to put out the riots that had broken out in the Corvetto neighborhood. "After 45 days I was able to sleep - said the mother -. Because that video means that the truth is coming".
The suspects
At the moment, the carabiniere who was driving the car that was tailing the scooter in the final stages (8 kilometers of pursuit in total) remains under investigation for manslaughter, as is Fares Bouzidi, Ramy's friend. Two other soldiers are under investigation for crimes ranging from procedural fraud and obstruction of justice to aiding and abetting, but the positions of the other three carabinieri (three patrols intervened) are also being examined in the investigation coordinated by the prosecutor Marcello Viola, the assistant Tiziana Siciliano and the prosecutors Marco Cirigliano and Giancarla Serafini . The list of suspects could grow, as well as the hypothesis of forgery for the annotation in the arrest report against Bouzidi for aggravated resistance. The main assessments, however, will have to be made on the reconstruction of the collision between a car and a motorcycle, between via Ripamonti and via Quaranta, which led to the young man's death. The hypothesis of voluntary homicide with eventual intent takes shape, that is, with the acceptance of the risk that the death event would occur
The shocking video
In the images filmed by a carabinieri car, you can see an initial impact between the Gazelle and the scooter. After this ramming, the motorbike does not fall. And you can hear, in succession, some sentences from the soldiers. The first ("Fuck you... he didn't fall") pronounced immediately after the first collision. A second similar one during the chase: "Shut it down, shut it down... no, sh... he didn't fall." Finally, the third, when there seems to be further contact while the two vehicles are practically attached before the crash, as witnessed by a municipal camera. The carabinieri warn via radio that the two "fell." And one of their colleagues responds, again via radio, "fine." From the footage it seems that the 19-year-old may have been crushed between the car and a traffic light pole, because the car and the scooter, as you can see, crashed almost in the same place .
"The videos leave no room for doubt: there was a ramming by the carabinieri car on the scooter to cause it to fall and consequently the death of poor Ramy," explained lawyer Marco Romagnoli who, with his colleague Debora Piazza, is assisting Bouzidi. The two lawyers, as well as the lawyer of the Elgaml family, Barbara Indovina, are convinced that there are "elements to configure the facts as voluntary homicide."
(Online Union)