Hakimi's final hours were heard in court: beaten, isolated, and left to die in Santa Maria prison.

It was April 6, 2020. The whole of Italy was locked in the eerie silence of the first, rigid Covid-19 lockdown, but behind the thick walls of the surrounded house in Santa Maria Capua Vetere, tension cut the air like a knife. The night before, panic had spread among the inmates of the Nile ward upon hearing the news that an inmate had tested positive for the virus.

A spontaneous protest, a cry of desperation and collective fear that the prison administration decided to repress not with dialogue, but with brute force.

They call it a "cold retaliation." Not a sudden intervention to quell an ongoing uprising, but a methodical and organized punitive expedition, launched from above to restore order through terror. At the center of that whirlwind of blind violence was him: Hakimi Lamine, a 28-year-old Algerian, hastily labeled one of the protest's alleged "leaders."

The 28-year-old's ordeal: beatings, isolation, and bloody vomiting

The images captured by the prison's internal cameras, scrutinized by the Prosecutor's Office and analyzed during the closing arguments by prosecutors Alessandro Milita, Daniela Pannone, and Alessandra Pinto, provide horrifying glimpses of Hakimi being hunted down, surrounded, and beaten to death.

His ordeal of pain doesn't end in his original ward. He's dragged to the ground floor, where the blows continue to rain down in the form of kicks and punches from those who should have honored his uniform. Reduced to near death, the young man is thrown into the Danube isolation ward.
The details that emerged during the trial outline the contours of an inhuman agony:
Another inmate sees him vomiting blood, an unmistakable sign of the devastating internal trauma he suffered.
An officer hits him again, this time brandishing a baton.
No doctor intervened promptly; for the sake of treatment, on the evening of April 6th, he was given a simple paracetamol.
He is left alone, at the mercy of his own pain and screams, in an isolation block totally incompatible with his fragile clinical picture.

The rubber wall, the red herrings and medical responsibilities

It would take eleven long days before anyone truly noticed his condition. Only the decisive intervention of supervisory magistrate Marco Puglia, on April 17, resolved the situation by ordering an emergency medical examination. The report was clear: multiple contusion trauma localized primarily to the face, back, and lower limbs.

Yet the diversionary mechanism was already in place. Technical consultants and experts confirmed in court that Hakimi suffered from severe personality disorders: his mental condition made him completely incompatible with solitary confinement. He would have required a permanent guard and constant assistance. Furthermore, the regulations stipulated a maximum of 15 days in solitary confinement, yet Hakimi remained imprisoned there until May 4, 2020, the day of his death.

The family's defense, through attorney Luigi Romano, pointed the finger at the medical link in the chain: doctors who allegedly supported the silence, falsely certifying invented injuries to cover up the actions of the police.

The trial and the dock

Today, in the dock in this mega-trial involving 105 defendants, a game of legal civility is being played out. Some thirty people are facing charges for the death of Hakimi Lamine, which occurred exactly one month after the beating.

The charges weigh like millstones:

Death as a consequence of the crime of torture: contested above all by the officials and agents of the penitentiary police (among whom are names such as Pasquale Colucci, Gaetano Manganelli, Annarita Costanzo and Roberta Maietta).

Manslaughter: attributed to the same police officers, to the former regional director of prisons Antonio Fullone, to the former directors of the penitentiary institute Maria Parenti and Arturo Rubino (the one who signed the suspension of the open regime), and to the doctors on duty Giovanni Capuano and Francesco Andreozzi.

A marathon trial that delves into the bowels of an opaque prison system, where the search for procedural truth represents the only possible barrier against impunity and the abandonment of the state in places where rights should be guaranteed.