So now we know from Tuesday’s court hearing that Mamadou Kamara died after being kicked repeatedly in the genitals. Gunner Clive Cuschieri said he kicked him to restrain him, and that he aimed for his thigh, but doesn’t know where he got him

True, I’ve not seen that many brawls and street-fights, but still this doesn’t play right. When a man’s down, as this one was, to kick his thigh if he’s flat on his back, you’ve got to do it from the side. There’s no way you’re going to get his groin area by doing that, even intentionally, let alone by mistake or by missing that thigh. And if he’s down on his side, you don’t face his front with a view to kicking him in the thigh, of all places. Any kicks aimed in that direction, from that position, are aimed at one place only, and it’s not going to be the upper thigh.

I felt pretty sick reading the description of how the man was hunted down and caught. It read like they were describing the capture of a wild and dangerous beast, not a human being. A woman sees a black man hiding behind a car and she rings 112. Immediately, soldiers from the detention camp set off in hot pursuit, some of them in a van, another in his private car. Only the lassoes and hunting rifles are missing. There are five of them, but amazingly, they can’t overpower just one man between them, even though they are professional soldiers and detention camp officers. They say that he fought back, struggled and bit. One soldier pinned him down with his entire body weight while, presumably, the others followed the road-worker principle and watched. Then they did a bit of kicking.

By the time they got him into the van, he was unconscious. But they thought, hey, what the hell, let’s handcuff him all the same, just in case he recovers consciousness and suddenly rears up like something from a Hammer House of Horror film and lays into us for kicking him in the family jewels. And they also bound his ankles, for good measure. Or at least, that’s what they told the police and then the court.

We have no way of knowing whether they actually did their kicking after and not before he was trussed up. I can’t see how a man who is free to roll about, turn around, go into the foetal position or at the very least cover his groin with his hands would instead just lie there while getting kick after kick between the legs. If he wasn’t pinned down by the other lot, he must have been cuffed.

Once they were in the van with this unconscious, dying man who they had bound hand and foot, they sat about working on a cunning plan to get away with it. “We’ll say that he fought us until the end,” they agreed. I read that and thought – well, yes, he did fight you until the end, but what point are you trying to make here exactly? That it’s all right for five uniformed officers to set upon one unarmed individual and kick him into unconsciousness, just because he won’t get into your van?

Then, with their cunning plan in place, and that dying man in their van, they set off not for the Emergency Department at the general hospital, but for the Paola health centre. I’m surprised that no questions have so far been asked in court about this, unless I missed them. Everybody knows that people who have lost consciousness should be whizzed straight to A & E at the general hospital, preferably after an ambulance with paramedics is called out. Soldiers, especially, would know this. So taking him to the health centre instead was an act of gross negligence that is probably criminal in itself, and that is quite apart from the fact that it implies the wish to deceive. They probably thought that the situation at the health centre would be easier to manipulate to their advantage than the full-on crisis handling of A & E, with its teams of doctors and its strict reporting procedures.

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Fifty-four people have died of dehydration, exposure and drowning after leaving the Libyan coast in late June in a rubber inflatable with no water aboard, trying to reach Italy. Today, Tunisian fishermen found the sole survivor clinging to the remains of the boat and a jerry can, two weeks after he put out from the Libyan coast. The boat almost reached Italy, but was pushed back by high winds and then drifted in currents towards the Tunisian coast.

The Maltese reaction on the internet is predictable. It is not that they have died, but that we have been saved. To hell in a handcart, I would say.