Club fight leaves young man with gory bite wound

A 19-year-old man suffered a 'cannibalistic' attack after he was bitten on his side during an argument at a club in St Julian’s, MaltaToday has learnt.

The argument between the teenager and four adult men took place at Level 22 in the Portomaso Tower between Saturday and Sunday.  A woman also suffered head injuries.

Sources said that a verbal confrontation escalated to the point that one of the adult males ended up biting the young man in an incident described by an onlooker as “possibly drug-induced cannibalistic behaviour”.

According to the onlooker, one of the four men tried to kiss and touch the young man while the two groups were on the club’s balcony. 

The boy, a Swiss national, was joined by his sister and escorted out by bouncers.

While the two left the club, two women verbally confronted the group of men, who were described as being “well-dressed”. 

The altercation escalated to physical assault, with the four men allegedly beating the two girls, kicking them in the stomach and hitting one of them on the head. 

A witness who intervened said that she confronted the alleged aggressor about biting the boy, but as she turned her back to exit, she saw that the women were also being attacked. 

”It took me a while to find the bouncers, but it seemed as if they might have been purposely avoiding the situation,” she said. Since there were no bouncers in sight, it was random bystanders who provided assistance.

One of them claimed that the manager was asked to call the police and an ambulance. None arrived and the aggressors were allowed to leave the club unhindered.

“When we asked for assistance, [the manager] said the police were on the way. Eventually we found out he never called the police,” a woman said. 

A woman who witnessed both incidents and later assisted the victims, taking them to hospital and to the police station, described the victims as being in a “state of shock, visibly shaken and scared.”

When contacted, Peter Pace, general manager of Level 22, acknowledged that an altercation had taken place but insisted on a different version of events.

He told MaltaToday that the young man threw the first punch, and that the argument revolved around a female friend who was accompanying him. 

Pace said that the club’s security personnel had intervened swiftly to remove the youth from the altercation. After finding out that he was hurt, personnel fetched disinfectant spray to administer first aid.

Pace said he did not see the man being bitten and could not even understand how it could have happened.

He said that while he was busy tending to the man’s wound, he could not control the situation which developed between the man’s female companions and the four men. 

“One of the men tried to calm her [one of the girls] down, but she was very shaken,” Pace said.

According to him, one of the men pushed a woman, who then proceeded to kick him, to which he retaliated with excessive force.

“He shouldn’t have done that,” Pace said, “a man should never hit a woman, and I don’t agree with what he did in the slightest.” 

“But we didn’t know that this was going on at the same time, as we were dealing with [the injured man],” he said, explaining that the club only has three bouncers, and that he only ascertained the true sequence of events after watching CCTV footage.

Pace denied saying that he was going to call the police. “It’s not my responsibility to phone the police,” he said. “If something happened, they should go and file a police report themselves.”

He said that everything was caught on CCTV, and that he would be prepared to pass a copy of the footage on to the police, if so requested, as always happened in similar instances. 

“It’s not true that we refused to help. If it wasn’t for [our bouncers], the [young man] would have been killed.”

All victims went to St James hospital, where the boy received a vaccination for the serious bite wound, and is due for further tests for HIV and Hepatitis as a result, sources say. The young woman was then sent to Mater Dei hospital for further treatment.

A police report was filed.