A charge of vehicular homicide in
last month's fatal Milan police car chase of a 19-year-old
Egyptian-Italian man who jumped a control point on the back of a
scooter driven by a 22-year-old Tunisian friend will remain for
now and has not yet been upgraded to homicide with intent after
the release of a potentially incriminating video, prosecutors
said Friday.
They said the vehicular homicide charge would stay in place
pending more expert analyses and controls including a "cinematic
consultancy".
In the video, Carabinieri pursuing Ramy Elgaml and the scooter
driver Fares Bouzidi cursed after failing to knock the scooter
down and then shouted "good" when it did fall.
The video appeared to show the lead patrol car drive into the
scooter at the end of the eight-kilometre chase, which
reportedly started when Elgaml decided to jump the checkpoint
because he didn't have a valid license.
The video also appeared to show officers approaching a witness
and possibly intimating to him that he should erase evidence of
the fatal crash, as he had maintained.
The incident sparked several days of unrest in the high-crime
former working class Corvetto district where the young man
lived, in which several police were hurt.
More officers were hurt in a "solidarity" protest by anarchist
squatters in Turin Thursday night.
The incident is splitting Italian politics with rightwingers
defending the police action and leftwingers calling for the cops
to be prosecuted, invoking past, isolated episodes of police
brutality.
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