No inquiries into 12 falls from Police HQ bastion

No inquiry was held into 12 falls from the back of the Police Headquarters in Floriana, the spot from where a Maltese suspect claimed he had been pushed from shortly before he died. Nicholas Azzopardi, who died from the injuries he sustained a few days later, had claimed he was beaten up before being thrown off the bastion at the back of the Floriana headquarters. The allegations were found to be unsubstantiated by two inquiries. However, interest in the case was rekindled last week after Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi, in answer to a parliamentary question, revealed that there had been another 12 incidents were people fell off the same bastion. Eleven of these falls, which according to the Police were attempts to escape from the Floriana lock-up, happened during a single year between 2005 and 2006, when the premises doubled as a detention centre. However, a twelfth “escape”, by a Malian man, took place in March 2010, almost two years after the Azzopardi case. Yet there was no inquiry and no press release was issued, as had happened with all of the other cases. According to the police, the grand majority of cases involved escapes in which the migrants in detention attempted to...