Proceedings dropped after death of migrant in Vaud cell
Published: Tuesday, Dec 12th 2023, 14:30
العودة إلى البث المباشر
The Vaudois judiciary has closed the case of a 23-year-old Gambian who was falsely arrested in 2017 and died in a cantonal police cell. The victim's family has now lodged an appeal against this decision.
"The discontinuation order must be lifted. We are of the opinion that there must at least be a public trial," explained Christophe Tafelmacher, lawyer for the victim's mother, on Tuesday at the request of the Keystone-SDA news agency. He was confirming information from the French-speaking Swiss television station RTS.
"In this complex story, "there are an enormous number of people involved who have committed a series of negligent acts. Each of them could easily have made up for the previous mistake," the lawyer emphasized.
Mistaken for namesake
The young Gambian, who was living in an asylum center in Crissier VD, was arrested at Lausanne train station on 22 October 2017 for a small amount of marijuana. The border guards mistook him for a namesake who was to be deported to Italy. Lamin Fatty was thus deprived of his liberty without any legal justification, the complainants denounce.
Due to nausea, the asylum seeker, who suffered from severe epilepsy, was taken to Chuv University Hospital for a check-up. At the end of a short stay in hospital, he was detained in a cantonal police cell without the police having been informed of his illness.
No misconduct
On October 24, the young man suffered an epileptic seizure in his video-monitored cell that lasted about an hour and a half without anyone intervening. A police officer responsible for the video surveillance was charged with involuntary manslaughter because he had not noticed the seizure.
According to the discontinuation order approved by the public prosecutor's office on November 15, Fatty's death was due to "a chain of unfortunate circumstances". The public prosecutor's office ruled out direct and culpable misconduct on the part of the police.
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