A total of nine prison officers were injured, including two with serious cranial trauma, after a migrant prisoner violently attacked them, leading to major complaints being lodged by the Autonomous Penitentiary Police Union (SAPPE).
The incident took place at Dozza prison in Bologna, Italy, on Sunday morning, and saw the migrant, whose identity and national origin was not reported, lash out at the guards and go on a rampage that required two of the victims be transported immediately to a local hospital due to the extent of the head trauma they suffered, Il Giornale reports.
The extent and seriousness of the injuries prompted a response from the national secretary of SAPPE, Francesco Campobasso, and the deputy secretary general, Giovanni Battista Durante, who released a joint statement warning “there are increasingly frequent attacks on penitentiary police personnel, caused at times by inmates with mental health problems, but so many times by people who do not accept the rules imposed by law.”
“If it is true that the same detainee, even at other times, had already made himself responsible for similar episodes, we ask the administration to put in place adequate and appropriate initiatives, in order to prevent the personnel from continuing to pay the consequences of an absolutely inadequate level of organization,” they added.
The incident is not the first time prison officers in Italy have faced threats of violence or actual violence from migrant detainees. Earlier this year in January, radical Tunisian imam Mahmoud Jebali threatened to kill prison officers, saying, “Sooner or later you will all die, we will go into your houses and kill you and eat your corpses.”
Regular police in Italy have also been on the receiving end of migrant violence as recently as last week when a Senegalese man attacked a pair of officers in Turin while allegedly yelling “Allahu Akbar”, with one of the officers also suffering head trauma during the attack.
In neighbouring France, the security situation for prison officers has been even worse in recent years.
In October of 2017, for example, 50 out of 80 of the officers at the Vincennes Administrative Detention Centre took sick leave to protest the security conditions, while several months later in January of 2018 a radical Islamist attempted to murder three guards at the facility.