Party tiff over police HQ suicide

The Nationalist Party has demanded answers over reports that a prisoner attempted to commit suicide while locked up at the police headquarters last week. 

Following leaks to the media, the police confirmed that an internal investigation was launched into how a Syrian prisoner “managed to inflict an abrasion on his forearm”.

The prisoner has since been transferred to Mount Carmel Hospital as a precautionary measure. 

PN deputy leader Beppe Fenech Adami questioned why the government had kept the attempted suicide secret, and why home affairs minister Carmelo Abela did not refer to it at all during a recent parliamentary debate following the suicide of a prisoner at Mount Carmel’s forensic ward.

The Englishman was the third prisoner to have committed suicide in the past three months.

In a statement, the home affairs ministry said that Fenech Adami had ignored the fact that during the last five years, there had been 16 cases of suicide and self-harm in the police lock-up, ten of which took place in just two years between 2010 and 2012 under the former PN administration. “Using the same measure, why did Fenech Adami, who was parliamentary assistant to the home affairs minister before 2013, not report these suicide attempts to the media?”