2001 raid on Armando Diaz

A nearby building, housing the anti-globalization organization Indymedia and lawyers affiliated with the Genoa Social Forum, was also raided.

On July 21, 2001, shortly before midnight, mobile divisions of the Polizia di Stato of Genoa, Rome and Milan attacked the buildings, with the operational support of some battalions of the Carabinieri.

The police indiscriminately attacked the building's occupants, resulting in the arrest of 93 peaceful protesters; 61 were seriously injured and were taken to hospital, three of them were in a critical condition and one in a coma.

The raid resulted in the trial of 125 policemen, including managers and supervisors, for what was termed a beating from "Mexican butchery" by the assistant chief Michelangelo Fournier.

[1][2] None of the accused police officers were punished due to delays in the investigation and incompleteness of Italian laws under which torture was not recognised as a crime in 2001.

The numbers and designation of the security forces involved in the raid are still unknown, as they wore ski masks to hide their identities.

[6][7] The police raid on the school, which housed protesters linked to the Genoa Social Forum, took place a few minutes before midnight when most guests were already asleep.

Senior police officers planted two Molotov cocktails recovered elsewhere in the school, delivered to them by General Valerio Donnini that afternoon.

According to Covell, one policeman kicked him in the chest, breaking half-a-dozen ribs whose splintered ends then shredded the membrane of his left lung, and laughed.

Melanie Jonasch, a 28-year-old archaeology student from Berlin, was attacked by officers set upon her, beating her head so hard that she rapidly lost consciousness.

When she fell to the ground, officers circled her, beating and kicking her limp body, banging her head against a nearby cupboard, leaving her in a pool of blood.

Here, Daniel Albrecht, a 21-year-old cello student from Berlin, had his head beaten so badly that he needed surgery to stop bleeding in his brain.

Jaroslaw Engel, from Poland, managed to use builders' scaffolding to get out of the school, but he was caught in the street by some police drivers who smashed him over the head, laid him on the ground and stood over him smoking while his blood ran out across the tarmac.

Many victims of the raid were taken to the San Martino hospital, where police officers walked up and down the corridors, slapping their clubs into the palms of their hands, ordering the injured not to move around or look out of the window, keeping handcuffs on many of them and then, often with injuries still untended, shipping them across the city to join scores of others, from the Diaz school and from the street demonstrations, detained at the detention centre in the city's Bolzaneto district.

[16] A prisoner with an artificial leg and, unable to hold the stress position, collapsed and was rewarded with two bursts of pepper spray in his face and, later, a particularly savage beating.

Police doctors at the facility also participated in the torture, using ritual humiliation, threats of rape and deprivation of water, food, sleep and medical care.

One detainee, Marco Bistacchia was taken to an office, stripped naked, made to get down on all fours and told to bark like a dog and to shout "Viva la polizia Italiana!"

[20] While his citizens were being beaten and tormented in illegal detention, spokesmen for the then prime minister, Tony Blair, declared: "The Italian police had a difficult job to do.

[21] While the bloody bodies were being carried out of the Diaz Pertini building on stretchers, police told reporters that the ambulances lined up in the street were nothing to do with the raid.

The next day, senior officers held a press conference at which they announced that everybody in the building would be charged with aggressive resistance to arrest and conspiracy to cause destruction.

This included crowbars, hammers and nails which they themselves had taken from a builder's store next to the school; aluminium rucksack frames, which they presented as offensive weapons; 17 cameras; 13 pairs of swimming goggles; 10 pen-knives; and a bottle of sun-tan lotion.

They also displayed two Molotov cocktails which had been found by police earlier in the day in another part of the city and planted in the Diaz Pertini building as the raid ended.

Fifteen Italian police officers and doctors were sentenced to jail for brutally mistreating detainees at the Bolzaneto holding camp.

Cowell had suffered broken ribs, smashed teeth and a shredded lung in the attack, and had spent the better part of a decade traveling between the UK and Italy to pursue his case.