A British journalist who was permanently injured in a brutal police raid during the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001 has had his compensation slashed by Italian judges.
The Audit Court has ordered 16 Italian policemen to pay a reduced sum of €110,000 (£77,000) to Mark Covell, who had been awarded €350,000 in 2012 for the horrific injuries he received at the hands of police, in what has been called Europe’s worst post-war incident of police brutality.
The attack left him with a vein twisted around his spine, a perforated lung, broken fingers, 10 smashed teeth and eight broken ribs.
When the original award was announced Mr Covell, 47, who has post-traumatic stress disorder, said: “You can never recover from something like this. I have lost the best years of my life with what happened on 21 July. I will die 10 years younger than I should because of the physical damage to me.”
The reduction in the compensation payment was, the Audit Court said, due to the fact that the officers responsible for his injuries had never been identified. Of the dozens of policemen implicated in the violence against 93 demonstrators during the raid, most received light sentences or none at all because Italy had no law against torture in its penal code at that time.
