Police killing of soccer fan sparks riots in Italian cities

ROME — Italian police attempting to quell a brawl between rival soccer fans on Sunday shot and killed a supporter of a Roman team, sparking riots in four cities and forcing the postponement of several matches.

Groups of youths burned police vehicles near Rome’s Olympic Stadium and clashed with police firing tear gas in the northern city of Bergamo. Violence was also reported in Milan and the southern city of Taranto.

Top officials, from the president and prime minister to the mayor of Rome, pleaded for calm.

Italy, like many European countries, has struggled with this kind of sports violence for years. In February, fans were banned from a number of games and some matches were canceled after a Sicilian police officer was killed in post-match rioting, the 13th soccer-related death in Italy since 1962.

Still, violence has persisted, mostly instigated by fans known as “ultras,” the Italian version of soccer hooligans. Sunday’s explosion followed what police described as the accidental shooting earlier in the day of Gabriele Sandri, a 26-year-old disc jockey and fan of Rome’s Lazio team.

Police said he was killed at a highway rest stop near the Tuscan city of Arezzo when officers fired into the air to break up a fight between Lazio fans and backers of Milan’s Juventus club.

“It was a tragic error,” Arezzo Police Chief Vincenzo Giacobbe said of the killing, in a statement issued to the media. He said the unidentified officer who fired the fatal bullet was intervening to prevent scuffles between the two groups from escalating into a larger disorder.

Sandri was hit in the neck, Italian media reports said. He was traveling with fellow Lazio fans to Milan for their team’s match against Inter Milan.

“They killed my brother!” Cristiano Sandri shouted at reporters who crowded outside the Arezzo police station.

Friends described the dead man as passionate about soccer and utterly nonviolent. But his death became the pretext for a spasm of raucous demonstrations across the country.

In Rome, youths wearing ski masks and brandishing metal bars and rocks attacked a police headquarters near the Olympic Stadium and used garbage cans to block a nearby bridge over the Tiber River. They smashed windows and traffic lights and burned a police vehicle and a bus, according to witnesses’ reports.

A handful of minor injuries among police was reported, along with an undisclosed number of arrests. Two cameramen covering the rioting for news organizations also were reported injured in scuffling.

The Inter-Lazio match, which Sandri was traveling to see, was canceled after fans hurled rocks at a police station and shouted, “Assassins!” A contest between AC Milan and Atalanta in Bergamo was stopped after seven minutes when spectators enraged by news of the killing tried to storm the field.

Other games on Sunday were postponed or delayed by 10 minutes, with players and referees donning black armbands in observance of Sandri’s death.

Prime Minister Romano Prodi said the violence was “very worrisome” and ordered an investigation of the police shooting.

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wilkinson@latimes.com