70 231. This obligation to investigate is based on information that the Court has seen in the pleadings and arguments of the representatives and declarations received in public hearings before the Tribunal, as well as through information that, at the opportune time, was filed with the Commission and assessed by it.259 232. The representatives declared that “since the first moment of his detention,” Mr. Vélez Loor “was mistreated by State agents,” and during the ten months that he was in prison, “he was tortured as reprisal for demanding his rights.” In this manner, they refer in detail to the alleged acts that constitute “torture and mistreatment[,] including sexual torture,” in the following terms: a) upon his detention on [November 11, 2002], agents of the National Police of Panama that detained him fired several shots that compelled Mr. Vélez Loor to throw himself facedown on the floor. Later on, one of the agents put his foot on the head of Mr. Vélez Loor [and] the other stood on his hands and strongly pressed his bayonet on the [alleged] victim’s back, threatening to kill him. Afterward, they handcuffed him, put shackles on his feet, and made him walk barefoot to a small barracks, where he remained handcuffed to a pole for approximately 8 hours. b) in the Public Prison of La Palma, Mr. Jesús Vélez Loor and other migrants in an irregular situation initiated a hunger strike in order to demand their immediate deportation. In reprisal, the [alleged] victim received, in his words, “a blow to the spine, a fracture on his head with a wooden stick by which [I] was able to recognize the aggressor was from the police.” c) [in the Complex of La Joya-Joyita], he suffered a wound to the hip, a product of a fall from a hammock caused when members of the Police entered into cellblock No. 6 launching teargas bombs. In spite of having on repeated occasions applied for medical attention for the wounds that had been caused […] he was not provided [with such]. In the face of lack of response to his requests, on June 1, 2003, Mr. Vélez Loor sewed closed his mouth and initiated a new hunger strike in cellblock 6 of La Joyita in order to demand to be helped. [As] punishment, he was transferred to cellblock 12, considered as high security, in which, according to the words of the alleged victim, “they took off my clothes and threw me to the floor totally nude, they started beating me with the billy club on the back, on the legs, and the soles of the feet; they stomped on my head, and scraped my scalp with their boots while I was face down; afterwards, they lifted my head, pouring teargas on my face and eyes; I couldn’t breath and I had to break the strings on my mouth so that I could breath […] after this long torture [a] Lieutenant […] locked me up in a small cell called la Discoteca, […] then they threw teargas powder on my body and around the cell [which produces a] terrible suffocation […] a few hours later a homosexual guard arrived that proposed that if I had sexual relations with him, he would send me to another place […] and for having refused, he began to beat me, giving me a tremendous beating, and he took out a container of powder, which I do not know what it was, and he poured it on my back and private parts, then he put a little on some paper and with a pencil that he had in his pocket, he covered it in powder and put that strange material in my anus almost two centimeters to the inside part of my rectum with the eraser-end of the pencil, that powder burned me like fire.” 233. During the public hearing, Mr. Vélez Loor declared in a detailed manner that: 259 Original petition received by the Inter-American Commission on February 10, 2004 (case file of the evidence, tome I, Appendix 3 to the application, folios 225 to 228), and letters received at the InterAmerican Commission on August 3, 2004 (case file of the evidence, tome I, Appendix 3 to the application, folios 214 to 218). In the same vein, Comments on the Merits filed by the petitioner to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on January 31, 2007 (case file of the evidence, tome VIII, annex 38 to the answer to the application, folios 3326 to 3329) .