Spain: Nine Guardia Civil officers suspended in death in custody case
01 May 2005
The death in a Guardia Civil station in Roquetas de Mar (Almería) of Juan Martínez Galdeano, a 39-year-old farmer who had gone to the station because of a road accident in which he had been involved on 24 July 2005, resulted in nine officers, including the lieutenant in charge, being suspended for six months pending an internal investigation into the beating suffered by the man, which was a direct cause of his death, according to the autopsy. The man reportedly went to the station to seek protection from some Roma with whom he had had an accident and admitted that he had been consuming drugs previously. Police sources claimed that he reacted in an exalted manner when the Guardia Civil wanted to breathalise him, and that the blows suffered by the man resulted from efforts to restrain him. It subsequently emerged that two non-regulation truncheons were used by the officers to subdue him, one of them electric and the other one extendable. Following his resistance, he was detained for “challenging and resisting authority”, and the events leading to his death apparently took place as the officers tried to make Galdeano get into a van to be transferred, in the street in front of the Guardia Civil station, when he was violently beaten, according to eye witnesses. The autopsy spoke of an “acute respiratory or cardio-respiratory insufficiency”, and that the death was related to the man being restrained on his back and pressured on his chest. The injuries suffered included a broken sternum, a dislocated rib and bruises to almost every part of his body, including some that were caused by truncheon blows.
A lawyer representing some of the officers argued that the violence was “proportionate in the circumstances” and that “there was no active violence”, adding that there may be parallel causes for the death, in a possible reference to the victims’ use of drugs. The lawyer for the victim’s family claimed that the autopsy reveals “that the death was a result of the beating that they gave him, because the body has evidence of blows on all its limbs”. Events outside of the station have reportedly been recorded by a CCTV camera, and eye-winesses have also claimed seeing the Guardia Civil officers, some of whom were reportedly injured in the incident, beating him with kicks and punches, and reacting by placing their hands on their heads when they realised he had died.
A complaint for ill-treatment in custody against the officer in charge was reportedly filed in February 2005 by the father of a man who “was detained and ill-treated by the Guardia Civil lieutenant of Roquetas del Mar”, and beaten while he was handcuffed, according to the text of the complaint. The man argued that no inquiries had followed the complaint. The head of the Gurdia Civil, Carlos Gómez Arruche, argued that the officer’s record was clean, and minimised the significance of the use of truncheons, whose use was not authorised by saying that “they are not weapons, but rather defence [instruments], which are used in some countries and not in others”. Nonetheless, he announced that the officers involved had been suspended for six months.
El País, 2-5.8.2005.