Reportage
Hamid Badoui’s suicide in a Turin prison puts spotlight on Italy’s Albanian detention center
He was afraid he’d be returned to Albania. He had told his lawyer: “Better jail than the CPR.”
“He showed us a report card from a technical school in Turin, proud of his grades, all sevens and eights. But he was visibly frail, exhausted by his time in detention at the Gijader CPR.”
This is how MEP Cecilia Strada remembers Hamid Badoui, a 40-year-old of Moroccan origin who died by suicide on Saturday night in the Turin prison, having just returned to the city after spending over a month in detention at the Repatriation Center (CPR) in Albania where Strada met him.
Badoui lived in Turin, had been in Italy for 15 years, had an Italian ID card, a mother with a permanent residence permit and a sister who had obtained citizenship. He had ended up caught in a drug abuse spiral that led him to engage in petty theft so he could afford his dose of crack cocaine. What followed was a vicious cycle of convictions and prison stays, with no plan to fight the addiction on offer.
About two months ago, he had finished serving his last sentence at Lorusso Cutugno, but on the next day, because his residence papers had expired, he was transferred to the Bari CPR, where he remained for three months. From there he was sent off to the Albania center, which he returned from after a judge ruled that his detention was irregular, a decision that came “pending the ruling of the Constitutional Court on constitutionality, a matter raised in similar judgments.”
After he returned to Turin on Friday, Badoui was arrested in the Barriera di Milano neighborhood: he appears to have gone on a rampage against the police after suffering a theft. So he ended up in handcuffs again, while the entire neighborhood came out to protest that he shouldn’t be taken away.
Less than 24 hours later, the man hanged himself with his shoelaces. He was afraid he’d be returned to Albania. He had told his lawyer: “Better jail than the CPR.”
The prosecutors have opened an investigation. “He was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to take care of his mother, who was sick with a heart condition, and he was afraid of being sent back to Albania without being able to be of any help to her,” Strada recounted from their conversation. “He complained that at least in jail he could call his family, while [in Albania] he could not. All the people we met [editor’s note: 39 during the first visit and 25 during the second visit] were in very frail condition.”
These people were gathered up and sent off to the Albanian centers built by the Meloni government: “Little Guantanamos, without the possibility of talking to anyone, without knowing what their fate would be, since one can stay in there for up to 18 months,” the MEP concluded.
“No kind of migration management can be above people's dignity and mental health,” PD MEP Rachele Scarpa added. “We are facing yet another human and political failure. And the fact that the echo of this tragedy is so faint in the public conversation makes it even more unbearable. Hamid is not a random victim: he is the product of a system built to crush.”
Strada, together with Scarpa, have submitted a brief to the European Court describing how these transfers and the conditions under which they take place are comparable to torture: undocumented foreigners are picked up in Italy without warning, bound hand and ankle for 20 hours and transported to places they know nothing about and where their basic rights are not respected.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/meglio-il-carcere-che-finire-a-shengjin-hamid-badoui-suicida-a-torino on 2025-05-21