32 GIULIANI AND GAGGIO v. ITALY JUDGMENT carrying blunt instruments, the demonstrators had been prepared for possible clashes. 133. In these circumstances it was difficult to understand why officers Bruno and Mondelli had decided to launch an attack on the march. They had not received any orders to that effect; on the contrary, they had been requested to avoid crossing the marchers' path. The news that an attack was in progress had been greeted with cries of disapproval in the control room. 134. The carabinieri had been summoned to intervene urgently in Marassi Prison, where law-enforcement officers were struggling to cope with an attack by the Black Bloc. Accordingly, when they encountered the march they had attempted to clear the junction and the tunnel through which they wished to pass. According to the witness testimony of one journalist, judged to be “neutral” and therefore credible, youths belonging to the Black Bloc arriving from the opposite direction to the marchers had thrown stones at the carabinieri; this had led to the order to fire tear gas, given by Mr Bruno. The Court of Appeal concluded that, although the charge by the carabinieri had been illegitimate, they had been called upon to intervene in a situation characterised by violence from the Black Bloc demonstrators, who had earlier ransacked other parts of the city, and by the fact that the junction they needed to cross was occupied by the crowd and the tunnel was blocked by barricades. 135. In the Court of Appeal's view, the District Court had correctly found the following actions by the carabinieri to be illegitimate: (a) the firing of tear gas at chest height; (b) the failure to order the dispersal of the marchers, who were not causing a disturbance and who could only have entered the red zone much further on, at Piazza Verdi; (c) the attack on an authorised, peaceful march made up of unarmed demonstrators. While the Black Bloc had created serious disturbances elsewhere in the city, there was no proof that they were being “covered” by the marchers, that is, that they had hidden amongst them before or after committing acts of vandalism. 136. Furthermore, there had been arbitrary acts in the form of: the use of non-regulation batons (manganelli) (pieces of wood or iron wrapped in adhesive tape and a source of serious cuts and bleeding); the use of armoured vehicles to make “forays” amidst the demonstrators, pursuing some of them at high speed along the pavement (the Court of Appeal observed that the vehicles did not have sufficiently safe brakes and that one of them had pursued a demonstrator in zigzag fashion, as if attempting to run him over); the infliction of excessive injury and the beating of demonstrators, journalists and an ambulance driver. 137. The illegitimate and arbitrary attack had produced a reaction from the demonstrators which was not punishable in view of the grounds of justification provided for in Article 4 of Legislative Decree no. 288 of 1944.