The center for the disabled was a concentration camp: patients were beaten. Blitz of the carabinieri: three operators arrested

Five employees had transformed a residential care center for disabled people with spastic paralysis into a place of terror, with physical and verbal violence, threats and humiliation against disabled guests, unable to defend themselves or ask for help. Slaps, kicks, insults and threats were the order of the day in the private structure in the Brancaccio district in Palermo. Until this morning when the carabinieri of the Brancaccio station put an end to the torture suffered by the disabled with the execution of five pre-trial detention measures signed by the investigating judge at the request of the deputy prosecutor Laura Vaccaro and her substitutes from the weak groups department of the prosecutor’s office Palermo. The measure of house arrest was ordered for three operators, while the other two have the obligation to report to the judicial police with the simultaneous “prohibition of approaching the places usually frequented by the offended people”. The five suspects are held responsible for various reasons for the crime of ill-treatment against family members and cohabitants.

Months of wiretapping and video recordings have ascertained the violence that the disabled guests of the structure suffered daily: the hidden cameras placed by the carabinieri filmed an employee who grabbed a boy sitting on the sofa by the hair and dragged him to the ground, they immortalized a colleague while repeatedly hit a patient in the head and face when he was with other guests in one of the common rooms of the facility, they filmed an operator taking a boy’s head and banging it against a wall. In other images, an employee of the facility throws a wheelchair at the patient. Terrible images that testify to the violence of the five employees of the structure against the spastic disabled.

The audio and video wiretaps, carried out day and night inside the residential center with the constant presence of a patrol ready to intervene if necessary, in addition to documenting the systematic violence, highlighted the threats of the suspects to patients who did not have to tell what happened to no one under penalty of other tortures. Finally, the carabinieri ascertained that in many cases the operators of the structure did not treat patients often left without drug therapy or deprived of the rehabilitation therapies provided by the doctors.