46 GIULIANI AND GAGGIO v. ITALY JUDGMENT 163. Finally, the applicants submitted that M.P. had not issued clear warnings of his intention to use his firearm and that some of the photographs taken during the events showed a riot shield being used as protection in place of one of the broken windows of the jeep. (b) The Government 164. The Government argued that it was not the Court's task to call into question the findings of the investigation and the conclusions of the national judges. Accordingly, the reply – in the negative – to the question whether the domestic authorities had failed in their duty to protect the life of Carlo Giuliani was to be found in the request for the proceedings to be discontinued. In support of their assertions the Government referred to Grams v. Germany ((dec.), no. 33677/96, ECHR 1999-VII) and to the partly dissenting opinion of Judges Thomassen and Zagrebelsky in Ramsahai and Others v. the Netherlands (no. 52391/99, 10 November 2005), and requested the Court to follow that approach. 165. There had been no intentional taking of life in the instant case, nor had there been any “excessive use of force”. Furthermore, no causal link existed between the shot fired by M.P. and the death of Carlo Giuliani. Although the investigating judge, in her decision to discontinue the case, had applied Articles 52 and 53 of the CC, she had not disregarded the exceptional and unforeseeable circumstance whereby the shot had been deflected following a collision with a stone, a circumstance which had been assessed from the standpoint of proportionality. The Government inferred from this that the decision to discontinue the proceedings had exonerated M.P. on the ground that the causal link between the shot and Carlo Giuliani's death had been broken by the collision between the bullet and the stone and the deflection of the shot's trajectory. 166. In the view of the investigating judge, M.P. had acted on his own initiative, in a state of panic and in a situation where he had valid reasons to believe that there was a serious and imminent threat to his own life or physical integrity. Furthermore, M.P. had not aimed at Carlo Giuliani or anyone else. He had fired upwards, in a direction that entailed no risk of striking someone. Carlo Giuliani's death had not been the intended and direct consequence of the use of force, and the force used had not been potentially lethal (the Government referred, in particular, to Scavuzzo-Hager and Others v. Switzerland, no. 41773/98, §§ 58 and 60, 7 February 2006, and Kathleen Stewart v. the United Kingdom, no. 10044/82, Commission decision of 10 July 1984, Decisions and Reports (DR) 39). 167. Both parties' experts had agreed as to the fact that the bullet had already been in fragments when it hit the victim. The possibilities advanced by the applicants to explain why the bullet had fragmented – such as its having been manipulated in order to increase its capacity to fragment, or the