Massive Attack "It was inevitable that the centre would come under attack. The night before, we'd discussed this and there was a strategy to stash all the videotapes gathered by IMC. We had known that the raw footage may contain incriminating evidence, with people saying that the cops know that we have video evidence of police presence in the black bloc." SchNEWS correspondent Web: http://www.schnews.org.uk http://www.schnews.com

Massive Attack
"It was inevitable that the centre would come under attack. The night before, we'd discussed this and there was a strategy to stash all the videotapes gathered by IMC.
We had known that the raw footage may contain incriminating evidence, with people saying that the cops know that we have video evidence of police presence in the black bloc." SchNEWS correspondent

The attack on the centres was launched at midnight by the Mobile Operative Squad, claiming that the School and Indymedia Centre were 'harbouring black bloc'. One witness said "We could see them taking some laptops, and minidisc
players, other recording equipment and... some salad knives." The salad knives would later form part of the display the police would show to the world to show how violent the protesters were. They would also display construction equipment, hammers, bricks and scaffold bars but fail to mention that one of the schools was a building site!
One copper from the Squad has broken ranks comparing the operation to a nightmare under Pinochet's Chilean dictatorship accusing some colleagues of behaving like
fascists. He told the centre-Left daily La Republicca what happened when people got to a holding center "They lined them up and banged their heads against the walls. They urinated on one person. They beat people if they didn't sing Facetta
Nera [A Fascist hymn]. One girl was vomiting blood but the chief of the squad just looked on. They threatened to rape girls with their batons." Despite the raid, Indymedia kept going. There were continual multilingual updates and a web radio broadcast throughout the protests, with millions of hits on Italian Indymedia throughout the protests.