Nazim Mordjane, a 32-year-old Palestinian, had been detained at Bassone since October. Escaped in Milan in September, tracked down in Switzerland two weeks later, extradited to Italy. On Wednesday evening shortly after 9pm, while his cellmate was asleep, he went into the bathroom and breathed in the gas from the stove he was using, taking his own life. When the other inmate noticed it and called the prison police officers, nothing could be done to save him. Already a month ago Mordjane had attempted to take his own life, and ended up in intensive care for a few days, but then completely recovered. Detained for the theft of a Rolex, he arrived in prison in Como after escaping from the San Paolo hospital in Milan in September, when a prison police officer who was chasing him fell, hitting his head, and remained in a coma for a few days. He had been tracked down in Geneva at the beginning of October and taken to Como, the reference prison for extraditions from Switzerland.
Now the magistrate on duty at the Como Prosecutor’s Office will decide whether to order an autopsy, but there is little doubt about what happened last night. This is the thirty-second suicidal prisoner in prison since the beginning of the year and his death has reopened and further strengthened an increasingly urgent debate on the many people who daily commit acts of serious self-harm in prison, often with irreversible outcomes. A few weeks after the intervention of President Sergio Mattarella, “urgent interventions are needed on suicides in prison”, yesterday in Milan, the Municipal Guarantor for prisoners Francesco Maisto and the lawyers of the Criminal Chamber met on the steps of the Palace of Justice, where they chanted the names of the people who took their lives behind bars: 31 since the beginning of the year, to which the name of Nazim Mordjane was added. The initiative was intended to remember the “too many victims” of prison life, but also to remember the prison police officers who took their own lives in the last year.
“Despite repeated complaints about the tragic situation of Italian prisons – said the director of the Criminal Chamber of Milan – the suicide count has become a sort of macabre liturgy, a number that undergoes an unstoppable and tragic update, almost daily. The record, that of 84 suicides in a year, recorded in 2022, will be greatly exceeded at this rate. Those deaths are not an inevitable fate, but represent the consequence of a system, the penitentiary system and more generally of criminal justice, on which precise choices weigh. policies”. A joint demonstration to underline that “the overcrowding situation must immediately cease, through the adoption of urgent measures or with the rapid approval of the bill on special early release. Let’s go back to talking about amnesty and pardon, healthy measures for the balance of the penal system, which have been jointly missing since 1990. Let’s rethink the meaning of punishment, evaluate different and reasoned choices. But first of all, let’s immediately put an end to the illegality of the current detention situation.”
