"If you want to know just why the police decided to raid the Genoa Social Forum centres on the Saturday night, you should put that question to the honourable Fini."
The speaker is Vittorio Agnoletto, spokesman for the Genoa Social Forum (GSF), the main Italian, pacifist anti-globalisation movement. The "honourable Fini" is ex-Fascist Alleanza Nazionale leader and current Deputy Prime Minister, Gianfranco Fini.
In the protracted fallout from the violent events which marred the G8 summit in Genoa 10 days ago, costing one life and 231 injured not to mention an estimated £40 million in damages, a dark cloud hangs over the recently installed centre-right government of media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi.
For the last week serious questions have been asked both in Italy and abroad about the behaviour of the police and ca- rabinieri in Genoa. Not only the street warfare but, perhaps more worryingly, the police raid on the GSF centres and their treatment of protesters while in detention have been at the centre of concern expressed in Italy by the opposition, by senior Catholic bishops, by prominent figures in public life and even by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.
In the face of a huge and still growing international body of evidence, there seems little doubt that police, some policemen at least, resorted to systematic and unjustifiable brutality. Was this merely an "excess of zeal" or was it also done out of a sense of having "political cover" from a right-wing government?
In particular, the Saturday night raid on GSF centres prompts difficult questions. Breaking into the centre at midnight, police detained 93 people after staging a violent blitz that saw some protesters carried out injured in their sleeping bags.
At a subsequent news conference, police displayed a motley haul of sticks, bottles, iron bars and Swiss pocket knives as proof that the "pacifist" GSF had afforded shelter to the violent anarchist or "Black Bloc" operatives at the centre of the street riots. Furthermore, only one of the 93 detained was held over in custody.
If only one person was subsequently arrested, why use such violence? Was it necessary to stage such a blitz at midnight, as if police were raiding a Mafia hideout or terrorist base?
Throughout the last week Mr Berlusconi has expressed his solidarity with the security forces, arguing that "like the vast majority of Italians, I am on the side of . . . men who with courage and at great risk to themselves defended law and order, the state and all its citizens".
No one who was in the streets of Genoa could deny that the security forces were under huge pressure in a white-hot cauldron where battlelines had already been drawn up, partly by their presence in massive numbers but more by the gratuitous hooliganism of the Black Blocs.
Consistent reports through the last week, however, that detained protesters were made to shout "Viva il Duce" and "Uno, due, tre, Pinochet" would suggest that elements in the security forces went beyond their brief. Was such behaviour just the frustrated reaction of men who had been too long in the front line? Or was it the behaviour of a police force keen to please its new right-wing masters?
"What was Deputy Prime Minister Fini doing at police HQ in Genoa? What were four Alleanza Nazionale deputies doing in the Carabinieri Operations Room? Is there a link between these events and those shouting `Viva il Duce' or `Viva Pinochet'?" asked Democratic Left party whip and former house speaker, Luciano Violante, in an interview in the Rome daily La Repubblica yesterday.
While the six current judicial investigations will doubtless throw light on many aspects of the Genoa violence, there remains the awkward question of political responsibility. The buck will clearly stop on the Prime Minister's desk but is it a problem foisted on him by his Deputy Prime Minister?