BARCELONA, Spain (AP) –
A fifth night of peaceful protests to denounce the arrest of a Spanish rapper once again turned into clashes between police and members of marginal groups who set up street barricades and smashed shop windows on Saturday night in central Barcelona.
Small groups composed mainly of young people started their night game of cat and mouse with police officers an hour after several thousand demonstrators gathered in the capital of the Catalonia region in Spain, which was also where the worst violence occurred during earlier demonstrations this week. by rapper Pablo Hasél’s Detention.
The police were also hit by stones after a march in the Catalan city of Lleida, where Hasél spent 24 hours barricaded in a university building before the police took him to serve a 9-month prison term for insulting the Spanish monarchy and praising the violence. terrorist in your music.
Catalonia’s regional police force said there was also a challenge in the city of Tarragona, where groups threw glass bottles into police lines and smashed shop windows.
Police reported at least 11 arrests on Saturday, including three minors. The worst of the riots took place on Barcelona’s Passeig de Gràcia, the city’s most elegant shopping avenue, home to art deco apartment buildings considered architectural treasures.
The crowd made their way up the street, smashing shop windows, tearing down motorcycles and setting up metal barrier barricades in the streets and burning garbage containers to lessen police chase. Some even took the fight to the police lines, forcing officers to use shields to protect them from thrown stones. The police said they had identified a “young man” for targeting a police helicopter with a laser for two hours.
After leaving armored vans, the police wielded batons and fired foam bullets to disperse the groups.
The disorder appears to have arisen from a marginal group of people, mainly young people, who made up a small portion of the thousands of participants who joined the marches to support Hasél and oppose the Spanish laws used to prosecute him.
About 90 people have been arrested and more than 100 injured since Hasel’s arrest on Tuesday.
Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau called for calm.
“The defense of freedom of expression does not justify in any case the destruction of property, scaring our fellow citizens and harming companies already hit by the crisis” caused by the pandemic, said the mayor.
Marches were called for cities across Spain. Most were peaceful, but Pamplona, in the north-central, saw clashes between police and people throwing bottles.
Madrid city officials said 300 national police officers were called in to help the city’s police, but a protest by several hundred people was concluded in the Spanish capital without any separation from troublemakers.
Spain’s left-wing government announced last week, before Hasél was arrested, that it would change the law to remove prison sentences for crimes involving freedom of expression. He did not specifically mention the rap artist or set a timetable for the changes, and his promise seems to have done little to release the social tension that has overflowed.