3 August 2026 — how much time Abderrahim Fakir really had, and what the law says
The four Red Cross volunteers: what do they actually risk? And is that right?
Of the six people involved, the four Red Cross volunteers are the ones who have been spoken of worst. It is worth separating what they decided from what was decided above them.
╔══ THEY ARE NOT UNDER INVESTIGATION ══╗
The six are ENTERED IN THE PRELIMINARY REGISTER UNDER ARTICLE 45-bis, not in the register of persons under investigation: this is the effect of the provision known as the penal shield, Law no. 54 of 24 April 2026, Article 335-quinquies of the Code of Criminal Procedure. It is not an immunity and it does not stop the investigation. But someone subject to preliminary checks is not under investigation: to write “the four rescuers under investigation” means, as things stand, writing something false about people identifiable in their own neighbourhood.
╔══ WHAT THEY DID NOT DECIDE ══╗
The GREEN CODE, the lowest level of urgency, was assigned by the operations room. So was the dispatch of a BASIC AMBULANCE with no doctor and no nurse in response to a report of “a subject in psychiatric crisis”.
What they did do was the opposite: at 12.36 it was the volunteers who called the operations room for a medical consultation and asked for the doctor-staffed car — before the scuffle. They raised the alarm on their own initiative, judging that the situation exceeded their competence. The doctor-staffed car left at 12.42 and arrived at 12.53.
A basic life support crew can recognise cardiac arrest, perform compressions, ventilate and use a defibrillator. It cannot carry out an advanced clinical assessment or administer drugs: they could not sedate Abderrahim Fakir and shorten the officers' physical restraint that way. In criminal law, lack of skill is measured against the level of competence a person is required to have, not against a doctor's.
Neither the ages nor the identities of the four have been made public, and this archive does not attribute any. What can be said concerns the system: pre-hospital emergency care in Italy rests largely on volunteer, unpaid personnel.
╔══ THE SAFE SCENE ══╗
The first principle of rescue: you do not enter a scene that is not safe. It is not personal caution, it is an operating rule. The Red Cross: “They were there, waiting to be able to intervene. It is unthinkable that they could have done so on a subject who at that moment was in the hands of the police.”
The principle is not in dispute. What must be established is how it applied to those minutes: WHO declared the restraint phase over and safe, and WHEN. From that moment responsibility for Abderrahim Fakir's body passes from the officers to the medical staff.
╔══ WHAT WOULD HAVE TO BE PROVED ══╗
The prosecutor's working hypothesis is manslaughter, Article 589 of the Criminal Code, punishable by six months to five years. Three things are needed.
A POSITION OF GUARANTEE. Whoever takes charge of a patient has a duty to protect them, and failing to prevent an outcome amounts to causing it (Article 40, second paragraph, of the Criminal Code). But if the scene was under the exclusive control of the police, for those minutes the duty was not yet theirs.
FAULT. The protocol for psychiatric emergencies forbids leaving the patient prone: they must be placed on their side or on their back.
CAUSATION, and this is where everything is decided. With an omission it is not enough to prove that they waited: it must be proved that the omitted duty, had it been performed, WOULD HAVE PREVENTED THE OUTCOME WITH A HIGH DEGREE OF RATIONAL CREDIBILITY. That is the test laid down by the Joint Divisions of the Court of Cassation in the Franzese judgment, no. 30328 of 2002. Neither statistical probability nor an increase in risk will do: it would have to be proved that by approaching at 12.40 instead of 12.44, Abderrahim Fakir would be alive.
A QUESTION FOR A CRIMINAL LAWYER: the shield against liability for lack of skill introduced by the Gelli-Bianco law, Article 590-sexies of the Criminal Code, applies to “those practising the health professions”. A volunteer not enrolled in a professional register probably does not qualify, and would therefore be more exposed than a nurse in the same position.
╔══ HOW MUCH TIME ABDERRAHIM FAKIR REALLY HAD ══╗
“After four minutes the damage is irreversible”, “every minute costs ten per cent of survival”: figures that are true in one precise context and misleading outside it.
They come from the model of Larsen and others, Annals of Emergency Medicine, November 1993. The real decline without treatment is 5.5 per cent per minute, not ten. And the study is built on 1,667 patients in VENTRICULAR FIBRILLATION: a primary cardiac arrest, blood still oxygenated, a shockable rhythm. That is not this case. Italy's National Institute of Health, indeed, gives no figure at all: it says “a few minutes”.
WHY THE CLOCK STARTS EARLIER HERE. In an asphyxial arrest oxygen falls BEFORE the heart stops, and the damage accumulates during the hypoxia, not after it. Four factors were acting on Abderrahim Fakir at once:
— THE PRONE POSITION with compression of the chest, which reduces ventilation and pulmonary perfusion;
— THE STRUGGLE, which produces metabolic acidosis and burns through reserves;
— THE PEPPER SPRAY, sprayed in his face when he was already on the ground: the autopsy found irritation of the airways consistent with inhalation;
— COCAINE, which a preliminary test is said to have detected and which the definitive analyses must confirm: if confirmed, it increases oxygen consumption and acid production.
To these must be added his psychiatric crisis, which fuelled the agitation and therefore the exertion.
The review published by the Italian Society of Legal and Insurance Medicine on 27 July 2026 describes exactly this synergy: collapse follows from severe acidaemia and depressed cardiac contractility, “often in pulseless electrical activity, even without an initial phase of evident and marked desaturation”. In via Svevo the defibrillator analysed the rhythm and DID NOT ADVISE A SHOCK: a non-shockable rhythm, the category with the worst prognosis, the one in which a shock is useless and only removing the cause counts.
COCAINE DOES NOT MAKE THE RESTRAINT LIGHTER: IT MAKES IT WORSE. It is the combination of stimulants and the prone position that constitutes the high-risk scenario — in a Swedish national series of 52 deaths during restraint, the prone position occurs in 90 per cent of cases and substances in 69. The same review warns that the presence of cocaine “does not allow the death to be automatically classified as natural or due to substance use”, and devotes a chapter to asking whether “excited delirium” is not a forensic myth used to justify the use of force.
CONSEQUENCE. The clock does not start when the volunteers approach: it had already started. “How many minutes did the rescuers wait” is the wrong question. And it cuts both ways: it lightens the position of the four volunteers and increases the weight of the earlier phase, which does not concern them.
A WARNING THAT APPLIES TO EVERYONE PRESENT. The same source notes that the ability to speak does not prove that ventilation is adequate, and that “a sudden cessation of resistance must not be automatically interpreted as calm having been achieved, but as a possible sign of respiratory exhaustion or sudden collapse”. Abderrahim Fakir had said he could not breathe. Then the shouting faded until it stopped.
╔══ AND IF A DOCTOR HAD COME AT ONCE? ══╗
This is the question on which the case against the rescuers rests, and it is worth putting in full: suppose the doctor from the rapid response car had been in the courtyard from the first minute.
WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN ADDED. Not the defibrillator shock: that had already been ruled out by the device itself, because the rhythm was not shockable. What would have been added is drugs, advanced airway management and the possibility of sedating Abderrahim Fakir earlier. These are things that count WHILE the compression is going on, far less afterwards.
WHAT THE NUMBERS SAY. Survival after a cardiac arrest outside hospital is around ten per cent, and fewer than ten per cent of all such patients are discharged with good neurological function. For non-shockable rhythms of asphyxial origin those numbers fall further.
SO. To the question “would a doctor have been enough”, the honest answer is: at that point, in all probability no. Even on the best hypothesis, an outcome without brain damage was unlikely, because hypoxic damage accumulates during the compression and not from the moment someone bends down to help. The doctor was needed EARLIER. And the volunteers had in fact asked for one at 12.36, before the scuffle.
A NOTE ON METHOD. This archive does not write that Abderrahim Fakir would have suffered brain damage anyway: that cannot be demonstrated, and no expert will ever put it in those terms. It writes that an intact outcome was unlikely — which in criminal proceedings is precisely the point that matters. Because if a favourable outcome was unlikely even with the best possible care, proving that the rescuers' delay caused the death WITH A HIGH DEGREE OF RATIONAL CREDIBILITY, the standard required by the Court of Cassation, becomes almost impossible.
╔══ THE DUTY TO MONITOR ══╗
The European Court of Human Rights judgment in the Magherini case, of 15 January 2026, is set out in full in the entry on the legal framework. Only one point matters here, and it concerns the rescuers indirectly: the Court holds that when a person is held on the ground, what weighs is not only the initial lawfulness of the force, but also its duration, MEDICAL MONITORING and the ability to recognise clinical deterioration in time. Who was supposed to watch Abderrahim Fakir's breathing while he lay prone and bound is a question that, for the Court, falls within the obligation to protect life.
╔══ WHAT REMAINS TO BE ESTABLISHED ══╗
1. Who declared the restraint phase over and safe, and when.
2. Whether the volunteers approached after four minutes or after less than one: the memory of the defibrillator, seized by the prosecutor's office, will tell.
3. Whether a faster intervention would have prevented the death with a high degree of rational credibility. It is the only question that counts in criminal terms, and the answer is expected in the experts' report within ninety days of the autopsy.
4. Whether the definitive toxicology analyses confirm the cocaine and what role they attribute to it.
5. Whether Article 590-sexies of the Criminal Code covers a volunteer rescuer.
Until then the four remain what they were that day: people who had gone out unpaid to help someone, and who ended up inside something bigger than themselves.
SOURCES FOR THIS ENTRY (full links on page 4)
— The prosecutor's note on the 45-bis register: il Resto del Carlino, 23 July 2026. The penal shield: Sky TG24.
— Official health authority timeline and the Red Cross statement: Il Fatto Quotidiano, 20 July 2026.
— The four minutes from the bodycam: il Resto del Carlino, 26 July 2026.
— Ambulance service protocols for psychiatric emergencies: Il Fatto Quotidiano, 23 July 2026.
— Pathophysiology of restraint: Italian Society of Legal and Insurance Medicine, 27 July 2026.
— Survival model: Larsen, Eisenberg, Cummins, Hallstrom, Annals of Emergency Medicine, 1993. ERC 2021-2025 guidelines, Italian Resuscitation Council. MSD Manuals, professional edition. National Institute of Health, ISSalute.
— European Court of Human Rights, Magherini and Others v. Italy, application no. 32707/19, 15 January 2026.
— Provisions cited: Articles 40, 113, 589 and 590-sexies of the Criminal Code; Court of Cassation, Joint Divisions, Franzese judgment no. 30328 of 2002.