Spanish Court Reopens Case of Moroccan Teen’s Death in Juvenile Center Amid Restraint Controversy

In January, an investigating judge had concluded that the death on July 1, 2019 of Ilias Tahiri, the 18-year-old Moroccan, in the Tierras de Oria center in Andalusia was "accidental". But the newspaper El Pais published in June last year, surveillance video footage, at a time when demonstrations were being organized on both sides to denounce police brutality, after the death of George Floyd in the United States.

According to the images published by the newspaper, nothing in the young man’s resistance showed a violent attitude, to the point of justifying the "mechanical restraint" used against him. We could see employees of the center roughly place the young man on a bed, face down before immobilizing him with six and a guard kneeling on the boy’s lower back to tighten a strap around his waist before realizing that he was no longer breathing.