The Investigative Court Number 20 of Madrid has opened an investigation after receiving a complaint from three NGOs that have reported alleged attacks by police officers on inmates of the Aluche Foreigners Internment Center (CIE) in Madrid.
“They have brutally attacked several inmates with batons, kicks in the head, punches, in addition to insulting us and treating us like animals,” reads the letter that fifty inmates of the center signed and that three NGOs turned into a formal complaint last Friday. .
The events would have occurred on February 14 between 11:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m., when, according to the complainants, "11 visibly intoxicated guards entered and committed extremely barbaric acts."
The judge, one of the three competent to control these facilities in which the foreigners who are to be expelled are detained for a maximum of 60 days, has already initiated the first preliminary proceedings, according to a spokesperson for the Superior Court of Justice.
Although the investigation is in a very preliminary phase, the magistrate has asked the CIE for a complete report of the events and the medical reports of the people treated, which will be sent to a coroner.
These reports are relevant because the complaint itself, in which a series of images are attached with the injuries supposedly caused by the police, calls into question the center's medical reports.
“They have falsified them,” they say.
In the text sent by the immigrants, there is talk of a more seriously injured person who “bleds a lot” and who would have been taken from the scene unconscious.
The letter states that they do not know where he has been taken and his relatives also do not know his whereabouts.
They provide the identification number of one of the agents supposedly involved in the episode.
When asked, the Ministry of the Interior, on which these detention centers and the expulsion policy depend, has not commented on the case.
The complainants also explain in their letter that they have been suffering “threats, mistreatment and attacks” for “some time.”
“The agents usually make night visits to beat the inmates, taking advantage of the fact that there are no cameras,” they write.
The letter mentions another recent incident: “An officer has strangled an inmate until she was unconscious.”
The letter was sent on February 15 to three NGOs accredited to carry out visits to the CIE.
After receiving it, Samba Martine Human Rights Observatory, Coordinator of Barrios y Mundo en Movimiento, sent a complaint to the court and a complaint to the Ombudsman.
There is, so far, no movement from the Prosecutor's Office.
It is not the first complaint of attacks to come out of this detention center or the other seven, spread across several provinces in Spain.
It is common for investigations, if they are opened, to end up being archived due to the difficulty of proving the story and the added difficulty that the complainants and witnesses are people who end up being expelled from the country.
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