Selfie in front of maimed woman at train station sparks ethics debate

Updated

June 05, 2018 17:49:04

A photograph of a man taking a selfie in front of an injured woman being tended by emergency services has sparked furious discussion over the ethics of his "inhuman" act.

The Canadian woman was struck by a train at Piacenza station near Milan in northern Italy after walking out of the wrong door, local media reported.

Authorities rushed to her aid, but as they helped the woman, a man took a selfie from the platform with the woman and paramedics in the background.

The woman was taken to hospital, where one of her legs was amputated. Police caught the selfie-taker and forced him to delete the photo, the BBC reported.

But the image of the scene was captured by photojournalist Giorgio Lambri on May 26, and made front pages in Italy.

Lambri wrote about the image in the Liberta di Piacenza newspaper, under the headline, "The barbarism you don't expect: the 'selfie' in front of a tragedy".

In a post on Facebook, he also suggested an alternative headline, "Houston, we have a problem", complaining that people had lost their sense of ethics.

"I have seen many crimes and terrifying scenes, but I'm not ready to [see] this," Lambri told Canada's Global News.

"The most terrible thing is that guy [doesn't] understand absolutely the badness of his behaviour."

The incident similarly outraged local media and Facebook users, some of whom described it as a "repulsive affair", and "inhuman".

One local radio host told listeners the human race was "galloping towards extinction", the BBC reported, while Antonella Boralevi, a commentator for newspaper La Stampa, called it a "cancer that corrodes the internet".

Boralevi said the selfie-taker was not bad, but had instead had turned off his soul and personality and became an "automaton of the internet".

Topics:

community-and-society,

italy

First posted

June 05, 2018 17:18:32