The following story suggests that the officer involved is charged with manslaughter, not homicide, and that the autopsy reveals that the protestor was shot only once and was dead instantly when he hit the ground. The driver of the jeep was 'trying to escape protestors' when he drove over the body. The boys parents appeal for calm. In what seems to be a war of words the police paint the victim as a 'trouble making law breaker', (apparently he had one charge for insulting a police officer) and his friends and families paint a different picture. Offsite link : Death puts summit future in doubt
The Portland Indymedia site has a photo sequence posted in PDF format, with some running commentary (about 550 KB). (As compared to about 2.5 megs for the photo sequence linked to above and below...)
Offsite link : Officer charged with murder in death of G-8 protestor
Off site link : A G-8 protest photo essay (in Italian but pictures are a universal language) Links to 13 pages of pics, close to 200 KB per page (if you are on a slow internet connection patience will be required.) Not your typical travelog photo montage, includes pics of police getting ready for the summit, tear gassing, the G-8 boat, the air missile batteries, an unrelated pic of Green Peace dogging an Exxon oil tanker in January, and various events in the lives of protestors in Italy during the summit.
The following thumbnails are linked to the pictures posted on the net. Note that the pictures are high quality gifs, and some of them are over 100 KB in size, and slow to download even on a fast net connection...
Offsite link : Italian police storm Italian Independent Media Center - a photo of the after math. After sealing off a a square block paramilitary units stormed a school across the street from the Independent Media Center at the same time. There are also photos of the walls and floors covered with blood. You can listen to an mp3 file of the police raid on the Italian Independent Media Center by following this link. More coverage of events and photo sequences can be found at the Italian Independent Media Center (the site is in both Italian and English - their slogan 'Don't hate the media, become the media') or visit the Central Indepedent Media site with links to sites worldwide.
Protestor shot twice in the head at point blank range from the back of the Italian Paramilitary Land Rover...
After the protestor is shot twice in the head, the Land Rover begins backing up to crush to body. At this time there is no pool of blood gushing out of the victims head...
The Land Rover drives back and forth over the body twice...
The Land Rover drives off...
After being run over twice by the Land Rover a pool of blood pours out from the head wounds...
23 pictures are posted online at the URL listed above...
Some personal commentary : (see also - Guns or Roses?) The Independent Media centers were organized in response to constant media bias against those who dissent and protest against the injustice of world poverty (slums just don't happen, but are the result of land accumulation by a few powerful families, babies starve to death in a world of plenty, and protestors are usually slammed as simply lovers of violence. For example, one story on CNN claimed that the violent protestors were anarchists who were not concerned with protesting the excesses of capitalism, but were always looking for a chance to battle cops. Actually the truth of the matter is that they are just angry, and frustrated, and ignored, and probably just sick and tired of the way human life is cheapened in this place, and every attempt to resist the powerful in defence of the weak is swept under a rug. I hate to see them getting violent, but I can understand their anger and their frustration...And, when you consider all the people gunned down by police when unions were first forming, or the people tortured to death or killed by death squads to preserve the power of a small and very wealthy elite. For example a country like El Salvador is more or less the private property of about a dozen extremely wealthy families. The pattern is repeated across Latin America and around the world, where people live in squalor and poverty and face persecution, torture and violence, because let's just say that these oligarchic families of 'capitalists' that actually own so much of the planet can't hang onto it all just because everyone will agree that they 'deserve it' (being 'the upper classes' or so they like to be called). Well, let's just say that these kids aren't the only ones being violent in the world, and while their violence goes on a couple of days a year, this other type of instutionalized violence is going on every single day, but doesn't elicit the same level of outrage, and so hypocrisy seems evident in the coverage of the ways of the world, as well as perhaps some guilt that causes people to get angry at those who are angry for reminding us all of the corruption and injustice of our ways - after all, we would rather celebrate 'our way of life' than feel guilty, is it not true, and that probably goes a long way to explain the biased, even hypocritical attitudes people take towards such outbursts of protest at what is alleged to be the finest way of running a planet and the triumphant system at the turn of the millenium, pure capitalism unleashed...Its many excesses and the uncaring, unconcerned cruelty that is inflicted on great numbers of human beings is what is responsible for these yearly outbursts of anger and rage in the streets...)
An offsite BBC page - The gap between the rich and the poor - what inspired the protests ... These types of protests do not take place in a vacuum...
An alternative testimony of the police raid on the Italian Indymedia site and the school across the street.
The Campaign to Impeach George W. Bush
Click here for more information
