The black hole of Floriana

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi revealed in parliament that 13 people had allegedly 'fallen' (or 'jumped') off a bastion adjacent to the Police HQ in Floriana, while in police custody.

Dr Gonzi made this astonishing revelation as he offered an amnesty in exchange for information about the death of Nicholas Azzopardi: the only one of these 13 accident victims to have died from his injuries.

The remaining 12 were all foreigners, and are understood to have been irregular immigrants in detention at the Floriana depot.

It seems that these mishaps all took place between 2002 and 2011, with Azzopardi's case dating back to 2008. This means that both before and after this much publicised incident, a steady of stream of people had incurred injuries in a bid to escape from police GHQ, to go by the Commissioner of Police's statement to MaltaToday.

Yet it had to take a parliamentary question to elicit this information from government. Why were we not informed of virtually any of these cases by means of a police press release, as would have happened had we been dealing with (for instance) a street brawl or an inconsequential traffic accident?

This question assumes greater relevance when one bears in mind how the police did issue a press release in the case of Azzopardi - but only after his deathbed claims of police brutality had already been made public.

Even then, the press release limited itself only to stating that Azzopardi had 'injured himself while trying to escape' - a version that is depressingly reminiscent of the 'escape' in 1980 of another detainee (Nardu Debono), whose lifeless body would later be found under a bridge in Qormi.

The fact that the prime minister has now offered an amnesty to anyone who sheds light on Azzopardi's death is also in itself unusual: given that his own government had already approved a Whistleblower's Act, which in theory should serve the same function as an amnesty in such cases.

On Thursday Dr Gonzi claimed that this amnesty was intended only to set the family's mind at rest, and that he himself saw no reason to doubt the two inquiries conducted to date. What he omitted to mention, however, is that the initial magisterial inquiry had previously failed to take into account the credibility of the main witness: PC Adrian Lia, a disgraced officer who had previously been stripped of an award for heroism, after it transpired he had lied about his role in rescuing a girl from drowning in 2002. More recently still, Lia's name cropped up in connection with the theft of €30,000 from the Police Depot.

Moreover, in his initial investigation, the magistrate had also omitted to record Nicholas Azzopardi's deathbed testimony, against all accepted procedural norms.

But the greatest anomaly remains the fact that the Floriana Depot appears to suffer from such a chronic propensity for mishaps of this nature. Even if one were to accept that all 13 of the abovementioned mishaps were indeed 'accidental' - or attempts at suicide - it remains astounding that persons who are supposed to be in police custody should be somehow allowed to simply 'fall' (or, even worse, 'jump') off bastions with such alarming regularity.

One cannot by any stretch of the imagination reconcile the above scenario with the fact the police are supposed to be fully responsible for the health, safety and wellbeing of all persons in their custody. How are we to interpret that the fact that so many persons under arrest, or in detention at the Floriana lock-up, could manage to seriously injure themselves under practically identical circumstances, when they are supposed to be under strict surveillance at all times... and when there are even specific guidelines on how to minimise or avoid cases of suicide in detention (among other things), by ensuring that inmates do not wear shoe-laces, necklaces or any other potentially hazardous items?

To interpret all those 13 cases as 'accidents' would quite frankly also be to indict the administration of the police force for gross negligence, resulting in the death of at least one person and the injury of many more. It also serves to undermine public faith in the police, with potentially very serious consequences indeed.

How much more serious would these consequences be, if there was also reason to believe that some of those cases may not have been accidents at all? Writing in today's edition, Labour MP Evarist Bartolo claims that the CCTV footage viewed by the inquiring magistrate had been tampered with - an allegation which, if true, bears earth-shattering implications for the credibility of the Police Force.

Recent political history should have taught us that there is a hefty price to pay for losing confidence in this institution. One cannot therefore blithely accept a situation where doubts of such magnitude are allowed to cast a shadow over the country's entire law and order department, with little or no action taken to mitigate these doubts.

The country is owed an urgent explanation as to how the Floriana Depot - which is supposed to be the safest place in Malta - has deteriorated into the health and safety equivalent of a black hole. It also needs reassurance that allegations of apparent foul play, both in Azzopardi's accident and in the evidence afterwards, are unfounded.

Such is the importance of this matter that all other considerations - including the election date - are secondary.