“Deliberately thrown”: turning point about the death of Fatima, who died falling from the balcony at the age of 3

Not a game that ended in tragedy , but a deliberate act would have caused the death of Fatima, the three and a half year old girl who died last January 13 after falling from the fifth floor into a courtyard of a building in Turin.

The accusation against his mother's partner, the 32-year-old Mohssine Azhar, has changed: no longer manslaughter, a crime for which the man was in prison but was about to leave due to the expiry of the terms of pre-trial detention, but voluntary murder.

To bring about the turning point the story of Mary, mother of little Fatima, and some technical assessments.

“He grabbed Fatima just before I could take her and threw her off the balcony,” said the girl's mother. The little girl had gone up to her stepfather to thank him for a game: but he, angry with the woman and altered by the effect of alcohol or drugs, abruptly pushed her away from himself, making her roll to the ground. A friend present at the assessment collected the child to deliver her to her mother, who in the meantime had gone up and reached the balcony, but just at that moment Azhar would have grabbed her and deliberately threw her from the balcony. Immediately after the fall of Fatima, the mother, in a state of severe shock, was unable to explain the facts in a coherent manner.

Then there are the calculations of the trajectory of the fall and the intersections with the injuries found on the child. The consultants of the Prosecutor's Office together with the Scientific Police concluded that it could not be an accidental event. The little body touched the ground at a distance of about 2 meters and 60 from the balcony: too far, therefore, to assume that it had simply slipped from the hands of Azhar. A surveillance camera also recorded the moment of impact on the asphalt: from the analysis of the video (which lasts a couple of seconds) it is clear, according to the specialists, that the fall was not vertical.

The fact that Azhar was to be released from prison on April 12 due to the expiry of the terms of pre-trial detention and the fear that the man intended to leave for Tunisia also led to the change in the title of crime.

(Unioneonline / L)