Police shooting of soccer fan sparks riots

ROME – Italian police attempting to quell a brawl between rival soccer fans 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 also was 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.

Sunday’s backlash 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.

He was killed at a highway rest stop near the Tuscany city of Arezzo when police said they fired into the air to break up a fight between Lazio fans and supporters 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.

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 torched a police vehicle and a bus, according to witnesses’ reports.