Further details have emerged concerning an incident in which a man in police custody was assaulted by a police officer.

Earlier in July, the public prosecutor's office published a press release which was sparse on details. The release announced that five police officers were under investigation after a man detained in a holding cell was injured. The public prosecutor's office also confirmed that one police officer was in prison for mistreating and injuring the person in question.

The affair had gone through police circles, which detailed the events as the following. A drunk man was reported to the police in a bar in Esch-sur-Alzette, as he was disrupting other customers. Five young police officers arrived at the bar and escorted the man out, but given the man's drunkenness, the officers considered placing him in the drunk tank. In order to clarify the issue, they took the man to the hospital in Esch-sur-Alzette.

The doctor consulted at the CHEM hospital confirmed that the man could be taken to sleep off his inebriated state in the drunk tank. When the police officers were taking the man out of the hospital, the assault in question occurred. One of the officers punched the man in the face with such force that he broke the man's jaw and injured his eye. The police officers escorted the man to the holding cell rather than having him treated at the hospital, then wrote up their reports.

The next morning, the day shift officers discovered the man laying in a pool of his own blood and took him to the doctor. It remains unclear whether the man has lost sight in one eye. The injured party has nevertheless decided to report the brutality and pursue the issue legally. The victim is a 40-year-old Syrian refugee who fled the war in his homeland only to be assaulted by a police officer in Esch-sur-Alzette.

At the same time, the General Police Inspectorate began its internal investigation. The investigators first of all set out to find out what had happened in the hospital and found partial CCTV footage of the incident in the room. The IGP further concluded that the police officers on duty that night provided a different story in their reports to the footage taken from the hospital.

The public prosecutor's office provided search warrants for the homes of the five police officers, who were taken to the police commission at 6 am and arrested. Whilst four of the police officers only spent a night in the prison, the man who had assaulted the victim remains in custody. All five officers have been suspended.

A number of questions remain, namely why the police officer assaulted the man? The motive remains yet unknown and appears to be especially shrouded in mystery, given the other four officers covered up the assault. One theory is that the main aggressor was the superior officer of the group and the other police officers covered the incident up out of misguided loyalty.