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A court decreed preventive detention for six Chilean police officers accused of torturing and sexually assaulting a protester at a police station during the curfew that was imposed in the country during the first days of the social outbreak.

The autonomous and complainant National Institute of Human Rights (INDH) reported in its social networks that the Tenth Guarantee Court of Santiago issued a preventive detention for the police (name of the Chilean Police) "for constituting a serious danger to society."

The six agents were charged with a crime of torture , two of which were also charged with aggravated sexual abuse , the prosecution said.

The events occurred on the morning of October 21, three days after the major crisis of the current Chilean democracy broke out, when the medical student Josué Maureira was arrested in a curfew in front of a supermarket that was being looted.

As the young man told the Prosecutor's Office, he was beaten until he was unconscious and transferred to the police station of the municipality of Pedro Aguirre Cerda, located in the capital and one of the most denounced since the beginning of the crisis.

Once there, Maureira explained that he was beaten again until breaking his nasal septum, vexed for his sexual orientation and for wearing red-painted nails, raped with a baton, threatened with death and imprisoned for alleged assaults on the agents.

The police force is in the spotlight for its alleged brutality in the dispersion of the protests and has been accused of committing serious human rights violations by various international organizations such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights ( OHCHR), Amnesty International (AI) or Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The NHRI has filed a total of 943 complaints against State agents since the beginning of the revolts, of which five are for homicide, 750 for torture and cruel treatment and 134 for sexual violence (undressing, touching and four rapes).

Another court decreed Thursday preventive detention for five other agents for torture of a protester in the central Plaza Ñuñoa also during the curfew.

The Chilean president, the conservative Sebastián Piñera , has recognized punctual abuses but has denied a systematized policy to attack the protesters and has pledged to investigate the facts.

What began as a call for students to sneak into the Santiago subway to protest against the rate increase became a revolt over a fairer economic model, which has left at least 24 dead and episodes of extreme violence with looting , fires, barricades and destruction of public furniture.

Although the demonstrations have lost strength, there is still discontent in the streets and the crisis seems far from being solved, despite the social measures of the Government and the plebiscite of next April to decide if the Constitution is changed, written in the dictatorship of Augustus Pinochet (1973-1990) and indicated for being the origin of the great inequalities of the country.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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