Policeman Arrested Over Hasib's Death: “I felt ashamed”The agent on the phone said: “Intervention ended badly, he jumped”. “The person had jumped down once they were down in the courtyard.”
These are the words that Andrea Pellegrini – a police officer arrested yesterday and accused of torture in the Hasib Omerovic affair – reportedly told a local police officer in Rome on the afternoon of July 25, explaining that the intervention in the apartment in Primavalle, a north-western suburb of Rome, had ended badly.
A testimony reported in the order with which the investigating judge of Rome, Ezio Damizia, ordered house arrest for the policeman after the investigation by the police officers of the Flying Squad, coordinated by the additional prosecutor Michele Prestipino and the public prosecutor Stefano Luciani.
“An anomaly, which at the same time assumes evidentiary value of the fact that things did not go as reported in the note by Pellegrini, is deduced”, writes the investigating judge “from the statements” of an officer serving in the local police force and subsequent investigations.
Heard on 15 September 2022 “confirmed the fact that on the morning of July 25th, personnel from the Primavalle Police Station had gone to their command in order to trace the home of Hasib Omerovic, reporting in particular – is reported in the ordinance – that Andrea Pellegrini, a policeman he knew, had shown up with another colleague, both in plain clothes, asking if he had any information about a deaf-mute Roma person who goes around the neighborhood rummaging through dumpsters, adding that he was interested in this person because he had been the subject of several reports in the neighborhood for harassment of women, so much so that” people “he regretted that, as he was part of the local police group that dealt with such activities, no report to this effect had been received by their offices”.
The officer “also reported that in the afternoon of that same day (around 16.30:XNUMX p.m.) he had received a phone call from Pellegrini who strangely informed him that the investigation had ended badly, referring in particular to the fact that 'the person had thrown himself downstairs once they were down in the courtyard', a passage which was also quite singular, and probably denoting the intent to provide an unsolicited justification.
The anomaly appears even greater considering that the phone records do not show any phone calls at that time, from Pellegrini's cell phone to the agent's cell phone".
“When in doubt, write and cover your ass because then the wave of shit, if it ever arrives, will submerge everyone…”. This is what we read in a WhatsApp message – attached to the precautionary order with which Judge Ezio Damizia ordered house arrest for police officer Andrea Pellegrini, accused of the attack on Hasib Omerovic – between an inspector, on duty at the Flying Squad, and a female inspector from the Primavalle police station in which he advised her to draw up a service report.
According to the documents, shortly before the two had spoken on the phone and the policewoman had recommended to her colleague to carry out "the investigations very well because things are not as the officers wrote". The man, as written, was in fact on duty at the Flying Squad which yesterday evening carried out, at the end of detailed and timely investigations, the precautionary measure of house arrest against Pellegrini.
“I felt a sense of shame” for not having intervened and stopped what was happening. This is the justification that the agent who collaborated in the investigation into the Hasib Omerovic affair, gave to the investigators for not having immediately informed his superiors about what happened in the Primavalle apartment.
In the order, the investigating judge of the capital writes that the policeman, an eyewitness, “he reported that he had limited himself to confiding a few things (the door being broken down to a colleague and the slaps to another) and that he had somehow determined to sign the service report, the content of which did not correspond to what had happened, because Pellegrini was still his superior, whose 'weight' and attitudes he somehow suffered, and that only when the pressure of the press reports on the matter had become unbearable had he finally felt the need to go to the manager to 'report things as they had happened because in these situations it is useless to try to hide them'”.
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