BARCELONA, Spain (AP) –
A fifth night of peaceful protests to denounce the imprisonment of a Spanish rap artist has again erupted in clashes between police and members of fringe groups who set up street barricades and smashed windows on Saturday night in the city center of Barcelona, exposed.
Small groups, mostly made up of young people, began their nightly cat-and-mouse game with officers an hour after several thousand protesters gathered in the capital of Spain’s Catalonia region, where the worst violence during earlier protests also took place. took place this week over rapper. Pablo Hasél’s arrest.
Police also by stones thrown after a march a university building cordoned off in the Catalan city of Lleida, where Hasel 24 hours before the police took him to serve a prison sentence of nine months because he insulted the Spanish monarchy and praised terrorist violence in his music. .
The local police force in Catalonia said there was also a defiance in the city of Tarragona, where groups threw glass bottles at police lines and smashed shop windows.
Police have reported at least 11 arrests since Saturday, including three minors. The worst of the riots took place in Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona, the city’s most beautiful shopping boulevard where home buildings in art deco apartments are considered architectural treasures.
The mob popped up in the street, smashed the windshield of the store, overturned motorcycles and installed barriers with metal street barriers and burned garbage cans to slow down police efforts. Some even fought to the point of policing, forcing officers to use shields to protect them from hurling rocks. Police said they had identified one ‘youth’ to target a police helicopter with a laser for two hours.
After police threw out armored pickups, police swung batons and fired foam bullets to disperse the groups.
There seems to be a fringe group of mainly younger people who make up a small part of the thousands of participants who marched to support Hasél and to resist the Spanish laws that persecuted him.
About 90 people have been arrested and more than 100 people have been injured since Hasél’s arrest on Tuesday.
Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau has called for calm.
“The defense of freedom of expression in any case does not justify the destruction of property, the terror of our fellow citizens and the injury of businesses already injured by the crisis,” caused by the pandemic, the mayor said.
March was called for cities in Spain. Most were peaceful, but Pamplona in the central north saw clashes between police and people throwing bottles.
The municipal authority in Madrid said 300 national police officers had been called in to assist the city police, but a protest of several hundred people ended in the Spanish capital without the troublemakers splintering.
The left-wing government of Spain announced last week before Hasel was arrested that he would change the law to eliminate imprisonment for offenses involving freedom of expression. The rapporteur did not specifically mention the rap artist or a roster for the changes, and it seems that its promise has done little to release the social tension that has boiled over.