NEW YORK
Prosecutors in New York on Monday ordered a grand jury investigation into allegations that police sodomized a detainee with a walkie-talkie.
District Attorney Charles Hynes announced that "on the basis of preliminary conclusions of the early stages of my investigation ... I have ordered a special investigative grand jury to be empaneled."
Although police deny the claim, the allegation has whipped up controversy, with comparisons being drawn to a particularly brutal police rape incident 11 years ago.
The alleged victim, a body piercing salon employee named Michael Mineo, says he was held down in a city subway station and sodomized with an object he believes was a radio antenna, or possibly a truncheon.
Lawyers for Mineo, 24, say the incident took place October 15.
Mineo spent four days in hospital afterwards and last week returned to seek more treatment, the Daily News reported. However, his medical records have not been published.
Grand juries are used to decide whether there is sufficient evidence to proceed to indictment of a suspect. In many cases, prosecutors only go to a grand jury when they are reasonably sure of being able to proceed to a trial.
Police deny Mineo's accusations and say he was arrested in full view of the public after being caught smoking marijuana.
Investigators have seized the equipment of one officer for tests, but none of the officers allegedly involved has been suspended.
Despite those denials and the fact that there is no published physical evidence to support Mineo's claims, the issue is already explosive.
Activists against police brutality say the alleged incident recalls an officer's sodomizing of a 30-year-old Haitian immigrant with a broom handle in 1997.
The victim, Abner Louima, on Monday told the Daily News that "it does surprise me that this is happening 11 years after. We knew this was not something that's going to go away in one day."
Veteran black community leader Reverend Al Sharpton visited Mineo in hospital over the weekend and was quoted afterwards as saying that he found the story "compelling."
However, The New York Times reported important differences between the 1997 case and the recent incident.
Louima's rape took place in a police station, in contrast to the far more public setting of a subway station. Also, the earlier case had strong racial overtones, since the officers were white and the victim black.
In this incident, the officers under suspicion were of various races and Louima is white.
The prosecutor's decision to convene a grand jury also follows a bloody weekend on New York's streets.
Undercover police on Sunday shot dead two brothers following a shooting outside a nightlcub in the Brooklyn neighborhood.
Meanwhile, a New York mother reportedly confessed Sunday to beating to death her 11-year-old daughter, the New York Post reported.
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