A Police Officer Gave Nazi Salute Just Before Man Died in Custody

Still images from a Belgium jail’s surveillance footage show a Slovakian man being restrained by multiple police officers while one of the officers is making what appears to be a Nazi salute. The man later died as a result of the forceful restraint, according to Vice.

Jozef Chovanec was arrested at Belgium’s Charleroi airport back in 2018 for causing a disturbance on his flight. When he was put in his cell, he began to act erratically and repeatedly banged his head against the wall to the point of bleeding. Footage obtained by Belgian newspaper, Het Laatste Nieuws, shows officers then restraining Chovanec, as one officer sat on his chest for 16 minutes. The video also shows a group of officers laughing and one motioning a Nazi salute with one hand, while holding her fingers to her face with the other, to represent a Hitler mustache.

After the incident, Chovanec was taken to the hospital, where he slipped into a coma, and he died the following day. An autopsy revealed he was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and there is no explanation for his sudden erratic behavior.
But, Chovanec’s wife, Henrieta, said after seeing what happened to George Floyd, she thought of her husband. Now, she’s calling for the appointment of a new judge to his case after an ongoing investigation for the last two years has failed to get her and her family justice. In fact, she “feels like they’re trying to cover it up,” according to her lawyer.

“Something seemed to be going on with my husband – he wasn’t feeling well,” she told Het Laatste Nieuws. “But the police ignored my husband all night. When they saw the blood, they should have given him first aid. Instead, they sat on him. He couldn’t breathe properly.”

“[After seeing] the videos of the arrest of the American George Floyd, I immediately thought, ‘My husband died the same way,’ only the police also flat-out laughed at my husband, and a policewoman next to him did a Hitler salute. I want to know what happened and why [the police] behaved that way.”

After the images surfaced, the mayor of Charleroi, tweeted, “I, like many, am shocked by the images in the media. Such behavior is unacceptable. As for the Federal Police under the authority of the Minister of the Interior, I ask the latter to shed full light on this behavior.” A spokesperson for the Charleroi public prosecutor’s office is blaming “the crisis surrounding COVID-19” for the delay. A police spokesperson who spoke with the Belgian website Sudinfo said the officer who gave the Nazi salute would be dismissed, effective Thursday.