Hasel and his supporters have been barricading themselves inside the University of Lledia, in the northeastern capital of Lleida, near Barcelona, since Monday after his deadline to file himself after the conviction in a free speech expired.
On Tuesday, Catalan riot police stormed the university and arrested Hasel. The video of the arrest shows a defiant Hazel shouting, “You will never defeat us! You will never defeat us, we will resist until we achieve victory.”
Hasel surrendered to police until last Friday after the Spanish Supreme Court in May 2020 upheld the lower court’s conviction in March 2018 against the rapper, whose full name is Pablo Rivadulla Duro.
The conviction was for supporting terrorism, and also for slander and libel against the Spanish monarchy, through his messages on social media, according to a copy of the court sentence and a press statement in the Supreme Court about it. He was sentenced to nine months in prison.
The 70-page Supreme Court ruling said the rapper published tweets from 2014 to 2016 denouncing various institutions, while also dedicating phrases condemning certain people convicted of terrorism.
The verdict, seen by CNN, said that the rapper’s “Twitter profile at the time of publication of the tweets had more than 54,000 followers” and that the authorities found “1,915 tweets in which the terms GRAPO, Monarchy, King, ETA, Terrorism, Bomb, Police and Civil Guard. ‘
GRAPO is the banned Marxist paramilitary group, The October First Anti-Fascist Resistance Group. ETA was the armed Basque group, which was listed by Spain and the European Union as a terrorist group, killing more than 800 people in its long, unsuccessful struggle for Basque independence.
Hasel tweeted on Monday: “I stayed here without going into exile to contribute more to the spread of the message, to the mobilization and above all to the organization. They kept me captive with my head held high because I did not concede. “I was not afraid of them, because after I contributed my grain of sand to what I mentioned, we can all do it.”
Amid the protests on Tuesday night, Mossos (Catalonia’s police force) said on Twitter: ‘In Girona, a group of people with a violent attitude burned several containers and threw stones and pyrotechnic material at the police in the area of the Subdelegation. . “Mossos also said that a group of people burned a bank in Girona and removed several traffic signs.
On Friday, Hasel tweeted a statement saying, “At 20:00, the deadline to enter the prison voluntarily ends. It would be an unworthy humiliation to go on my own foot before such an unfair sentence, so that they I must come and kidnap me. “
He added: “More mobilizations have been called for when they put me in jail.”
‘If you answer in a forceful way, they will think twice before imposing another prison sentence for condemning the culprits of the policies we suffer, and it is possible to take me out. “If we do not push the state back into the oppressive level and others, we are so much more and that, it’s time to say enough and take to the streets,” the statement read.
Amnesty International in Spain tweeted on Tuesday: “Pablo Hasel going to jail is INJUST. We will not stop until the crimes of the criminal law that restrict artistic expression are repealed. Cases like this can not be repeated.”
The Supreme Court’s press note, to which Hasel’s ruling refers, states that “freedom of speech has its limits” and is “conditioned by other rights and constitutional demands.”