Derek Chauvin, the United States police officer whose murder of George Floyd sparked massive racial justice protests in 2020, has been stabbed in prison.

It was gathered that the policeman was stabbed in prison on Friday, November 24, 2023.

Chauvin knelt on the 46-year-old Black man’s neck for more than nine minutes on a Minneapolis street despite the dying man’s pleas.

Floyd’s cries of “I can’t breathe” were a rallying call for demonstrators domestically and abroad who took to the streets in the killing’s aftermath.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed the assault without naming the person wounded.

The Bureau, in a statement, said: “An incarcerated individual was assaulted at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Tucson, in the southwestern state of Arizona.

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“Responding employees initiated life-saving measures for one incarcerated individual”.

It added that the wounded individual was sent to a local hospital “for further treatment and evaluation”.

Chauvin survived the attack, according to a New York Times source.

Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in 2021, and sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison.

The incident was caught on video – providing a drastically different version of events than the initial police news release, which simply stated that “officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress.”

A Justice Department probe into the Minneapolis police, the findings of which were published in June 2023, said the officers in the department routinely resorted to violent and racist practices, “including unjustified deadly force”.

The city of Minneapolis, in the midwestern state of Minnesota, also settled a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the Floyd family, agreeing to pay his relatives $27 million.

The Star